


Inevitable

by cellorocket



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Awkward Romance, Bad Decisions, Eventual Smut, F/M, Fix-It, Gen, Hijinks & Shenanigans, Slow Burn, True Companions, enough mutual pining to kill a nerf, fake dating - undercover edition, featuring: subterfuge, obligatory 'what if some of these sad characters DIDNT die' au, there will be a plot eventually i swear
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-22
Updated: 2017-07-19
Packaged: 2018-09-11 00:33:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 11
Words: 45,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8945566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cellorocket/pseuds/cellorocket
Summary: He had the kind of face you saw everywhere, and nowhere at the same time – so unremarkably average that it was almost suspicious. But he knew how to wear it, knew how to be a thousand different things; whatever the mission required. Though he often disappeared into whatever role he was assigned, sometimes she saw glimmers of an emotion she couldn’t read ripple over those strangely common features, and knew it had no place in a liar’s arsenal of masks.Sad eyes, she thought, shivering. He can’t hide those.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I have to start this off with a confession: I absolutely loved the ending to Rogue One. I thought it fit the tone of the story and conflict perfectly. But I'm also super fascinated by Jyn and Cassian's Connection and really wanted to write about it. Thus; delusion.
> 
> some kind generous souls have posted gorgeous art to tie into my fic so i've compiled them here. thank you so much!! <3  
>  **[x](https://bossard.tumblr.com/post/156358351217/spacepandar-ive-been-reading-this-rebelcaptain) [x](https://bossard.tumblr.com/post/156489053692/after-a-moment-jyn-threw-her-head-back-with) [x](https://bossard.tumblr.com/post/156891251707/jyn-groped-absently-at-her-neck-only-when-she)** [x](https://bossard.tumblr.com/post/157715934417/spacepandar-too-tired-to-follow-the) [x](https://bossard.tumblr.com/post/158512898732/a-sketch-of-what-i-visualize) [x](https://bossard.tumblr.com/post/158633400872/she-looked-upset-and-he-didnt-want-to-make-it) [x](https://bossard.tumblr.com/post/158633419142/it-hurt-to-move-but-he-inched-his-hand-across-the) [x](https://bossard.tumblr.com/post/158667357202/jyn-closed-her-eyes-and-forced-herself-to-be-as) [x](https://bossard.tumblr.com/post/158703734142/she-didnt-notice-it-at-first-this-was-not-like) [x](https://bossard.tumblr.com/post/159228035342/spacepandar-what-do-you-want-bodhi-rook-he) [x](https://bossard.tumblr.com/post/159377178272/spacepandar-what-little-of-dravens-reserve) [x](https://bossard.tumblr.com/post/159377194857/spacepandar-im-almost-afraid-to-ask-how-youd) [x](https://bossard.tumblr.com/post/161199390937/spacepandar-hed-no-sooner-toppled-out-of-the)
> 
> (the roguejedi starts up around ch7!)

 

Cassian climbed.

Each breath stuck to his aching ribs like a blade, whistling through clenched teeth; he couldn’t get enough air, and his vision swam as he pulled himself upward. Every few moments the rumble of an explosion outside would make the durasteel shiver beneath his raw fingers.

The hatch was so far above him. He feared that each grapple was his last; he would lose his footing and fall, and there would be no getting up from that one. It would be easier, less effort to let go. It would hurt less.

 _Jyn,_ he thought. _Jyn is up there._

And the man in white had been in pursuit. Maybe she’d already dispatched the Imperials and completed their mission, and wouldn’t need his help anymore. But he couldn’t let himself rest until he knew they had succeeded. More than that, he’d made a promise to someone who’d been left behind her whole life and he wouldn’t break it now, not while he had strength left.

So, he climbed. His arms strained in their sockets, shoulders tight, ribs aching so badly that his head spun. He had nearly sobbed when he found the maintenance lift defunct, but by now he had put the despair behind him, and focused only on the immediate goal: he had to climb. Don’t fall, he urged himself, don’t fall don’t fall don’t –

A nearby explosion shook the tower, and his fingers slipped from their precarious hold. He flailed for purchase, nerves snapping as the floor shimmered below, undulating like water. His heart surged up his throat. She might already be dead, the cold voice whispered, the Captain and spy. _Control your expectations._ His breath stilled, thoughts flattened, and he reached for the next ledge.

If another group of Imperials found him, _he’d_ be dead. He couldn’t hold himself up with one arm anymore, or see well enough to shoot, so they’d make quick work of him before moving onto Jyn.  _If she’s alive._

Staring at the ledge above him, he sorted through his potential injuries; a concussion, almost certainly, and broken ribs. There was something wrong with his hip too; when he put any weight on his left leg, the agony was so shattering that he nearly swooned. The last time he’d been hurt this bad, he’d needed K to exfiltrate, which the droid had done with customary frank assessment and commentary. There never was a pushier worrywart, person or droid. _Don’t think about him_ , he lectured himself, eyes burning. _You still have work to do._

The hatch was closer now, just an armspan away. He could reach if he was reckless. A bead of icy sweat trickled down the side of his face, tickling his neck before soaking the filthy collar of his shirt. His fingers shook, slipped. He was not reckless, not when so much counted on accuracy; groaning in pain, he hauled himself up another ledge before balancing precariously atop, gripping the sides of the wall.

He had to jump.

A reel of facts arrayed themselves in Cassian’s mind; he would die if he fell again, and Jyn would carry on the mission alone, more likely to fail than if she’d had someone watching her back – she might already be dead, for all he knew. He hadn’t heard an explosion in a long time – a lull: in their favor, or the Empire’s? _A stupid question_. They’d come here with so few forces, death was all but certain.

But they could still complete their mission.

Sucking in a hard breath, he steadied himself, shifting his weight to his right leg. The hatch shimmered above, and a wave of vertigo nearly pitched him over the side. _The plans_ , he thought, steeling his nerve. _Jyn._

He sprang upward, fingers scrabbling, and cried out when his hip slammed against the wall. But he was too close to give up now; though his vision dimmed and arms shook, he dragged himself up by pure force of will alone.

A gust of wind whistled through the durasteel beams. It was colder up here; his damp shirt clung to his back, making him shiver. At first, he couldn’t see Jyn, or anyone – no ships, no blasterfire, no sound; it was as if the moon had completely evacuated while he desperately clawed his way up the archive. A thrill of foreboding twisted his gut.

Voices; he spun, bracing against a console. It was Jyn and the man in white; he had a gun trained on her, but she squared off against him like a brawler, shoulders hiked and head down, like she was a second away from bum-rushing him. Her eyes seared with feral hatred; a woman aflame.

His heart lurched. He drew his blaster before he was consciously aware of moving, or even deciding. His hands rattled, too badly to take the shot. He grit his teeth, stilling himself, pushing away the panic and pain. _Quickly … easy._ He thought of Jedha and the fight in the Holy Quarter; remembered the weight of her above him after she’d tackled him to the ground, her arms crossed over their heads, the explosion still ringing in his ears. She hadn’t even thought about it.  

And he fired.

The rest happened in slow motion. The man in white crumpled, then fell. A rush of sound swept over the platform; ion cannons, ships knifing through low atmo, before muffling to silence. She saw him, she looked at him, right through him, and her hard expression softened into something he had never seen before.

He’d never been smiled at like that in his life.

~

Jyn had no time to marvel; she rushed forward just as Cassian pitched toward the platform, catching him only at the last moment and bracing his weight against hers. He was heavier than she thought he’d be, but warm and solid, beautifully alive. His skin was sallow, covered with a fine sheen of sweat, and blood tracked down from the corner of his mouth. She remembered, then.

“Let’s go,” she told him.

His eyelids fluttered. “The plans?”

“I’ve transmitted them. I’d just finished when he showed up.” A nod at the prone body behind them. Her smile shook a little. 

It was stupid to hope, stupid to expect any different, not when they’d gone so long without contact from the rest of the squad, but looking up at Cassian, spiteful determination settled in her chest. It wasn’t fair to rob him of what he’d fought so hard to see; unjust that he should give everything for peace and never know it himself. The gate was open; if they hurried, they might still be able to escape.  

“Come on,” she said, touching his face, trying to bring him around. “Stay with me.”   

He sucked in a wet gasp, sagging hard against her, before she felt him tense and steady, new focus in his eyes. _“Always.”_

 _How can you say things like that and mean them?_ She couldn’t stand him sometimes; a liar until he wasn’t, and good luck trying to tell the difference. Hysterical laughter caught in her throat. Stupid to think about it now, with battle raging around them.

They staggered into the auxiliary turbolift, Cassian slumping against the wall as she punched in the ground floor on the flickering console. He could barely stand. She wanted to ask him how he’d climbed twelve stories with such serious injuries, but she supposed she already knew, this one truth if nothing else; he never thought about himself.

With a bang and a screech, the lift lurched downward, and she threw her arms around Cassian before he could fall. “Hold on to me,” she said, uselessly; they were already so close, near enough that she could feel his breath against her temple. Despite his pain and fading grasp on consciousness, his arm was solid around her, steady. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d really held someone like this, or been held.  She flushed; stupid to get bent out of shape over an unconnected thought, madness summoned by adrenaline. You never knew what shock would do to your brain.

Light swelled, spilling over his gaunt features, before they slipped into darkness again. But she felt his stare, like heat on bare skin after a lifetime spent in the cold, and wondered distantly how he could touch her without his hands, only a look. Their breathing entwined, painfully loud in the close space. Through his shirt, she felt the warmth of him, his narrow waist; lean-muscled from a lean life. She knew so little about it.

 _Don’t look at me like that._ She couldn’t form the words.

Static on the comlink startled them both; Cassian winced as she jostled, and she grit her teeth, steadying her hold on him. She needed to be more careful; he was already so hurt, she didn’t need to make it worse with her carelessness.

“Bodhi?” she whispered, too exhausted to press.  

A long, crackling silence. Then: _“I’m here.”_

“What’s happening?”

Static.

She closed her eyes. “Bodhi?”  

Cassian’s arm tightened around her shoulder, and his ragged breath hitched in the taut silence. Another rumble shook the earth. Too long. She had accepted their situation when Bodhi spoke again. _“Our ship ---oyed. Rep – transport is going to ----- on their way. The way to tower beachf--- is clear. Sortof, anyw— You got to hurry though. P-please hurry. They’re pulling troops out.”_

Understanding dawned; there could be only one reason why they’d withdraw personnel.

“It’s too far,” Cassian whispered, sagging against her. He’d put it together first. “You –“

“Shut up.”

He continued stubbornly, trying to wrench free. “You can make it if you –“

“Don’t fight me,” she shot back, and firmed her hold on him. He was trembling, or it might have been her own shivering hands, shuddering bones. “You’ll only make this harder.”

He shook his head. “Jyn …”

“You’re really going to do this now? _Seriously_?” Something fierce rose in her chest, coiled around her heart. “I’m not leaving without you. So every moment you spend trying to be a big martyr is a moment we could have used getting to Bodhi.”

The martyr comment clearly annoyed him. “I’m not trying to be a martyr, I’m being realistic. You know I won’t be able to make it that far. We take long enough and they’ll leave you.”

“They’ll leave _us_ ,” she snapped. _Why don’t you ever think about yourself?!_ She needed to try a different strategy. “You said you’d stick with me. _All the way,_ remember? Because _I_ remember.” Her voice shook with emotion she didn’t understand. “You’re going to ditch me so soon?”

She knew she had him; he couldn’t disagree without being a hypocrite, or let her waste any more time. “Jyn …” he sighed, a concession, almost in awe.

 _Stop saying my name like that._ She secured her grip around his waist before setting out at a desperate pace, and he kept up as best he could, though with each step a hiss of pain escaped between his clenched teeth, a muscle flickering in his jaw. She was breathing hard too, panic pushing her pulse up her throat, but purpose centered her thoughts. She wasn’t about to let him die, not when there was still a chance to live, not after he’d saved her so many times.

Together, they limped out into the blistering sunlight.

~

Bodhi Rook knew he was dead.

They were all dead, really; it had just taken him a little longer to wrap his head around it. Yet there was a dumb, animal part of his brain that couldn’t help but to hope, despite every awful thing he’d seen today, because hoping felt better. Maybe Jyn and Cassian would get here soon, maybe the lull would hold, maybe the push on the west beach would keep the Imperials pinned down, maybe the confusion above would distract any pursuing forces, maybe they really would make it back. A pile of maybes, sturdy as a sandbank.

 _Stupi_ d, he thought as he stared at the Alliance soldier next to him, spraying blaster fire over their cover. A returning volley smashed the plasteel, showering him in sparks. No one else had expected to survive this mission. It made him feel childish, ridiculously out of place. He wasn’t brave like them; he wanted to do the right thing, but lacked the nerve to follow through.

Yet he hoped. The gate had been destroyed; maybe they could make it. _Maybe._  

A pair of fighters screamed past overhead, spewing cannonfire. Debris streaked across the sky, adorned every few moments by a burst of orange and red. He tried not to think about how many people had died in the last five minutes. He tried not to think about Baze and Chirrut.

 _The Force is with me, and I am one with the Force._ It didn’t sound right when he said it, even in his head.

 _“Two minutes!”_ squawked a voice on the comm. Bodhi nearly dropped his stolen rifle. _“Be ready to move!”_

A block of ice froze in his gut. _Jyn and Cassian._ He’d tried to raise them twice in the last hour but there had been nothing, no reply, not even static. They were probably dead, he coached himself. This was an island full of people who wanted to kill them. It was an obvious conclusion, yet still he hoped; if anyone could make it out of a place like that, it was Jyn and Cassian.

“They’re still coming,” he insisted to the transport pilot. “They have the hard copy. Just in case, right?” It sounded stupid even to his ears.

_“Are you ---azy? We have to get out of here now!”_

“I know –“

_“Have you looked up in the last hour?”_

He had been avoiding it, but he did so now. A gunmetal moon rose from the hazy clouds, nearly faded into the blue, much too close. His breath stalled; they had far less time than even their most pessimistic contingencies allowed. He remembered the crumbling stones of Jedha, the earth disintegrating right under their feet. He’d seen this monstrosity up close, yet even then he still couldn’t help hoping he was wrong. Like an idiot.

_Where are you guys?_

A swarm of Imperials crested the hill half a kilometer away, chrome blazing in the sunlight, and sprayed their position with blasterfire. Shouts, orders; a grenade whistled overhead before smashing into a cargo pod, blasting it to smithereens, raining their cover with stinging smoke and debris. That was the thing about a battle, Bodhi thought distantly – you could plan all you wanted, but in the middle of the confusion there wasn’t much you could do but keep your head down and hope.

 _You could fight,_ a sly little voice said. _That’s what Jyn and Cassian would do._   Another grenade struck true this time, a chorus of screams shattered the air, then the _boom_. Something fleshy splattered his cheek; the sounds faded, overridden by the ringing in his ears. Acrid smoke filled his nostrils, choking and thick. _You could die._

 _The smoke will make it hard for the Imperials to see, though_. That was lucky.

The woman next to him howled something into her comm; sand spattered his face and neck. Explosions popped in the distance, rumbling on the horizon. A streak of red and silver soared overhead, engines screaming. _Our transport_ , Bodhi saw, then understood moments later. Only way out now. Jyn and Cassian weren’t coming – they were probably already dead, and Bodhi was the idiot who couldn’t just accept the truth, even in the middle of a battle none of them were likely to survive. If they weren’t killed by the Imperial squads rushing their position, then it’d be the Death Star, or a Destroyer in pursuit once they broke atmo.

_The Force is with me, and I am one with the Force._

He rose into a half-crouch and scrambled awkwardly across the beach, hands raised over his head like he could bat aside oncoming blasterfire. _Stupid._ There was no accounting for dumb instinct. He’d splashed clumsily into the water when something caught the corner of his eye. He cursed the rush of hope that nearly choked him, fought it with cold pragmatism; it was an Imperial squad cutting them off from behind, an AT-AT with cannons trained on them, tiny as ants, the Emperor himself come to kill them all with a wave of his hand.

A shuddery breath rushed out of him when he heard his name, and saw her wave. It was Jyn and Cassian, hobbling out of the tree line. “Cover them!” the squad-leader screamed when she saw. “Take out those grenadiers!” So slow, they were moving so slow, the Death Star would fire any minute now, or one of those Imperials would blow their transport out of the air with a grenade. _Why are they moving so slow? He_ realized in a flash of instinct – one of them must be hurt.

Without thinking, he splashed out of the transport (like an idiot) and slogged over to them. His heart raced, but it didn’t make him feel shaky and weak like it usually did. _The smoke’s clearing_ , he thought, oddly calm. _We need to hurry._  

“Jyn!”

They looked like they’d been through the guts of reactor core; their faces were flushed red, streaked with grime, and Cassian’s was bloodied. His eyes fluttered closed, barely conscious, and she slumped beneath his arm, clutching her side with a sooty hand. They staggered into the surf just as Bodhi reached them. “Help me with him,” Jyn wheezed.  

She looked like she could barely stand, let alone carry a grown man. Quickly, Bodhi slung one of Cassian’s arms around his shoulder and half dragged, half-carried him to the shuttle. “Jyn,” Cassian mumbled, head lolling, when Bodhi hauled him inside.

“She’s coming,” Bodhi said. “Hang on.”

He’d no sooner replied before he dove out into the hail of blasterfire again, pushing past another squad of soldiers as they rushed on board. Jyn crouched in the surf, gasping, and he settled an arm around her. “Come on,” he urged, gently. Shots whizzed over their heads. “We’re getting out of here.”

“Baze?” she whispered. “Chirrut?”

He couldn’t speak; the words wouldn’t dislodge. He shook his head.

The shuttle was halfway to liftoff when the pair of them staggered onboard, and before long they were flying, and he always felt best flying; the shiver of engines beneath his feet, a rumble he felt down to his bones. Even pitching about, with pilots white-knuckled on the controls, calling for someone to cover their escape, things was better in the air. Anything was better than the beach.

Cassian had lost consciousness. Jyn groped for his hand, slumping at his side, and Bodhi hovered over them, anxious and aching and utterly useless. He’d gotten out with only bangs and scrapes – it wasn't right that they should be so hurt, when they’d done so much. He’d done hardly anything at all.

_The Force is with me, and I am one with the Force._

Just as they broke atmo, a lance of green light pierced the sky.


	2. Chapter 2

_This is what happened:_

_A combination of minor equipment failure and administrative ineptitude delayed the Death Star from ending the assault on Scarif for approximately six standard hours. During which time, the Rebel Alliance was able to infiltrate the archive compound for reasons unconfirmed, while also crippling major areas to preempt our counterassault. In this, they were largely effective. Their team was comprised at least one traitor, as infiltration of this scale required firsthand knowledge of Imperial procedure and infrastructure, in addition to shuttle codes through the shield gate; it would not be possible to mount such an operation on intel from intercepted transmissions alone._

_The Scarif installation is lost; Grand Moff Tarkin saw fit to postpone his engagement until the rebels had evacuated nearly a third of their forces from the moon, after which we were able to cut off only a fraction of their retreat. I need not remind you that anything less in these engagements than decisive victory is unacceptable; due to our incompetence, these terrorists persist in threatening the peace we labor to secure for the galaxy._

_We have succeeded only in preventing the rebels from acquiring any additional sensitive information, though as thousands of our forces were slain, billions of credits wasted, and most of the Empire’s structural records lost, including the most sensitive of all, this is a small comfort._

_I will apprise Lord Vader of the situation when he arrives, and instruct you further per his command. Stand by._

_-Fifth Admiral Rhysode, final communiqué_

 

~

Bodhi woke first.

His injuries were the least severe of those who returned from Scarif, so the medics prescribed him a round of bacta and two days of rest, just to be safe. They probably thought they were doing him a favor, giving what he saw time to settle, but two days might as well have been two years; Bodhi managed only a few hours before the itching in his thoughts drove him from bed.

Giving the medics a wide berth, he skirted the edges of the medbay and watched them work; scanning datapads and prepping bacta tanks, a pair of droids beeping softly as they made the rounds. Bodhi twitched the astringent smell of the room out of his nose, inching closer to the door. They probably wouldn’t force him to sit quietly, since he hadn’t been hurt like the others, but he didn’t want to push his luck. He couldn’t bear another minute staring at the ceiling, memories and worries tangling into unease.

He needed to find Jyn and Cassian.

Part of it was genuine concern; a big part. Halfway back to Yavin IV, Jyn had passed out too; after frantic inspection, he discovered that she’d been shot twice, once through the shoulder and a graze on her side. _Dark clothes_ , Bodhi thought, pushing aside the burned scraps of cloth. _We were all too focused on escaping to see_. It was true, but it didn’t make him feel any less guilty. Left untreated even for a few hours, blaster burns could cause permanent nerve damage. He tried not to think about how upset Galen would have been by that.

But part of it was something smaller, more pathetic; in a bustling rebel base filled with hundreds, Bodhi was alone. He knew nothing and no one, was woefully uninformed on procedure; he barely even knew were the refreshers were. He felt ridiculous without Jyn and Cassian; two beacons of purpose, assured no matter where they found themselves. Cassian especially; he’d belonged here for a long time.

 _I can’t be the only defector in the rebellion._ A medical droid jostled by him, and he flinched out of its path, his heart sinking; he certainly wasn’t the only Imperial defector in the galaxy, but he was probably the only one stupid enough to throw his lot in with the opposing side. Most had probably gone into hiding on some Outer Rim backwater planet, or lost themselves in a smuggler’s haven. If they hadn’t been caught and executed first.

It might have been stupid, he allowed, but it was _right_. _The right thing to do._ Galen would have been proud. Though maybe that spoke to the scientist’s expectations more than anything else, since Bodhi had barely done anything. A messenger, an average pilot and middling technician. He’d clutched a stolen rifle on a beach while braver people died around him.

A gentle touch on the elbow snapped his nerves, nearly like pain; he spun to face a medic with kindly eyes, her grey brows tented in concern. “Are you feeling alright?”

“Y-yes! Yes, I am. Absolutely fine, thank you. I could – could probably get right back to work. If that’s – if you --” He trailed off, flushing darkly. There was no use getting anxious, he lectured himself. _They’re not going to punish you for flinching. Or asking questions_. He summoned his nerve. “Actually, could – could you tell me where to find Jyn Erso and Captain Andor?”

 _What if it’s the morgue?!_ “They’re – they’re alright … right?”

The medic didn’t even have to consult a datapad; everyone knew about the crazies who had stolen schematics for the Empire’s teeth. Going by the medic’s expression, they probably also knew about Bodhi’s minimal involvement, to his dismay. “You were with them, right?”

“I just flew the shuttle,” he clarified hastily.

The medic was quiet, studying him with such inexplicable tenderness that his stomach twisted. “Come with me,” she said at last, gesturing for him to follow.

She led him through the cramped facility, exchanging soft words with the other medics as they passed. Rows of wounded soldiers crowded the room, one of them coughing wetly into the sleeve of his uniform, and their moaning mingled with the beeping of monitors. Bodhi’s neck prickled, creeping and cold. He didn’t see anyone from the infiltration team here.

 _Of course not._ Still, he’d hoped. He couldn’t help hoping.

The medic brought him to a small, dimly lit room, just off the main floor, flanked by six bacta chambers and a complement of intensive care units. It was quieter here, the room hazy with medics whispering and liquid burbling, and the soft pulse of a heart monitor. He didn’t recognize the man hooked up to it.

Of the six beds, four were full; the first three occupants slept, but the fourth cast her keen gaze around the room, like she wanted to make a break for it but needed to know the layout better first. There were circles haloed beneath her eyes, and she looked paler than Bodhi remembered, unnervingly exsanguinated. But Jyn brightened when she saw him, struggling weakly with the bedsheets tucked around her legs. “Bodhi!”

“Ah, ah,” said the kindly medic, suddenly stern; the kind of tone a mother would use on a misbehaving child. “ _You_ have to stay in bed.”

Maybe that was a thing with medics. Bodhi made a placating gesture, inching away. “We will – I mean, she will. That’s what I meant – she will. I’ll make sure. Thank you!”

“Yes, thank you,” called Jyn.  

The medic was not appeased; her brows furrowed low. “If you keep fidgeting, it’ll take three times as long to heal as it would otherwise. And that’s if you don’t cause permanent damage. Be patient.”

He could practically feel Jyn’s incredulity from across the room. “I’ll be sure to keep that in mind,” she said, tone ripe with sarcasm.

Bodhi was starting to get the feeling she wasn’t happy unless she was fighting with someone. Frowning, the medic noted something on her datapad and strode from the room; no sooner had her neatly coifed head disappeared around the corner before Jyn started pulling at her sheets again.

“She just told you not to move around,” Bodhi chastised, hurrying over.

“So come here and I won’t have to.”

She looked even worse up close – arms and face mottled with bruises, and a thick wad of bandages poked out from the neck of her shirt. But before he could fret, she pulled him into a firm embrace, and he draped his arms gently around her. Her hair was damp, heavy with the scent of bacta. He wondered how long they’d had to treat her.

Arriving at base hadn’t done it, or the bacta, or the kindly healer, but holding Jyn made him feel finally like the beach was behind him, a shadowed memory that belonged to another person. Hope fit better in this place; not a distant whisper in darkness but rooted to the foundation, strengthened by shared purpose. For now, they were safe. They would be alright.

“Where’s Cassian?” he said when he drew away.

Her face fell, and she nodded at one of the tanks on the other side of the room. “He was in there when I woke up.”

Bodhi pulled a stool over to the side of her bed and settled himself, tucking his hands under his legs to still their jumping. It didn’t sound good to him, but she looked upset and he didn’t want to make it worse with his agonizing. “He’ll be okay,” he said. He wasn’t sure he believed it, but he wanted to. That had to count for something.

Wincing, she lay back against the crinkly medbay pillows, her eyes troubled. “You’re right.”

“What happened to you, anyway?” he blurted before he could stop himself. The bruises stuck out of the corner of his eye like signposts, garish even in dim light.  “You look like you fell too.”

“Oh, those are old. Older,” she clarified. “I might have brawled with some Stormtroopers on Jedha.”

“In armor?!” _What was_ wrong _with her?_ “Didn’t you have a blaster?”

“And a truncheon,” she said with wry satisfaction. “They never saw it coming. I mean, would you? If you wore armor and had a nice blaster, would you expect someone to charge you and beat your face in?”

“... Probably not.”

“Exactly.” She pursed her lips, pensive. “You could probably take one out with a rock if you wanted to badly enough.”

“You’d need pretty good aim.”

“Or leverage.”

He almost smiled. “Persistence.”

“See, now you’re getting it.” She wasn’t that much like Galen, yet at the same time he saw a little of him in her eyes – not the color, but the way she looked at the world, circling it slowly, probing for weakness.  She fixed him with that penetrating gaze, pinning him to his seat. “Have you heard anything?”

He shook his head.

“The plans? Did they get them?” He heard the unspoken question; _was it worth it?_

Chirrut would have thought it was; even their attempt had cost the Empire dearly. It had been the _will of the Force_. Baze would have harrumphed at that, less because he disagreed and more out of a sense of duty, or habit. “I don’t know.”

She took a long breath, let it out slowly through her nose, and closed her eyes. “Do you ever get that feeling – like a scratching in your head, when something’s dried up and the situation’s about to go bad. Do you know what I mean?”

He nodded – he knew it intimately. “Do you have it now?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think everyone’s going to be happy about this.”

“About what we did?”

“Yeah. Especially if they didn’t receive the transmission, or the ship was lost, or ...” Her expression darkened, tempered with grim intensity, and a shiver chased down his spine. “Cassian will get the worst of it.”

~

_It is summer; sparse flurries swirl from a woolen sky, dusting pale grass with snow. The cold bites his cheeks and nose, but Cas doesn’t mind it. He runs faster when it’s cold, and it takes him longer to get tired. In winter he’s not allowed to go outside at all._

_“You remember what you’re supposed to do?” his father asks. Cas can’t see his face, can’t see through the haze shrouding him. Can’t remember what he looks like. He presses a jagged rock into the center of Cas’ palm, too big for him to hold in a fist. “You remember where you’re supposed to put it?”_

_He doesn’t remember his father, but he remembers the rock, exactly what the rock looked like; grey, speckled with the color of sunset and glimmering faintly in the light. He’d picked it out of the quarry on his way to the factory, selected one with the perfect shape, tested its strength between his solid fingers. His father always had to do things properly._

_“Take care and you’ll only have to do it once.” But that’s a lie, just like everything else. His father only knows how to lie._

_-_

_He did everything right, he sobs later. He did everything he was supposed to._

_-_

**_Climb!_ **

_K’s vocabulator bends, breaks. The pieces scatter. They weren’t supposed to lose like this, it wasn’t supposed to happen this way. Cassian riddled with smoking blasterholes, burned beyond recognition, a smear on some Imperial bulkhead; but he was supposed to go first. That was the deal._

_“It’s likely,” K says over his shoulder, ever acerbic. He’d never heard such a tone from a droid. “You aren’t much concerned with your own survival.”_

_-_

_They’re watching him, too. His murders, his ghosts. It was for the rebellion, he tells them. It was for freedom._

_What about_  
our  
freedom?

_-_

_jyn …_

_he watches her progress more than his own, agonizes over every foothold. she slips, scrabbles against the ledge and his heart plummets; he reaches for her, though he wouldn’t be able to catch her if she fell.  in that heart-snap moment before the world returns, he thinks that if the Force was worth belief, it’d see her off this moon to someplace better, someplace safe with someone who loves her. a childish hope – she’d laugh at him if she could hear it._

_he sees her face as he falls, growing smaller, her eyes – the sound of her voice, his name shattering the silence like glass – keep going, he wants to say, but his body won’t obey. keep going. keep going. keep going. this isn’t how it’s supposed to happen, this wasn’t the deal he made – he’s supposed to go first, but not while someone needs him._

_jyn …_

_not while he needs her_

_-_

_keep going._

_keep going._

_keep going.  
                 _

_Her fingers bite into his waist, her labored breathing loud in his ear; he can’t move, so she moves for them both. It’s too bright here, even in the shade of wide-leafed trees, turning their palms to the sun. “We’re almost there,” she gasps. “Hold onto me.”_

_He never wants to let go. He wants nothing more._

_keep going –_

_A flash of red light, and she screams. They fall. The stench of charred flesh and smoke sticks to the back of his throat. Dry grass, sand scraping against his cheek, in his mouth. The taste of earth. Blasterfire. When a warm body slams into the ground beside him, he doesn’t know at first – he only fears, marrow deep dread wrapping black fingers around his throat. But she coughs, gasps, clutches his arm._

_“Jyn …?”_

_“I’m fine,” she whispers. “It’s fine. Hold onto me.”_

_keep going …_

_It’s not fine, it wasn’t fine. She wasn’t fine, but he can’t force the words off his tongue. It makes a sick kind of sense, he thinks as she drags him along, each of her pained gasps working the blade deeper, straight to bone. This is what happens when you lie to her._

_~_

Cassian opened his eyes. Dim light crowded his vision and he squinted against it, groaning softly. A medbay – the one on Yavin IV. It had been awhile; last time he was here,  K had gotten into an argument with one of the medical droids over the quality of his treatment, berating them for their ‘appalling negligence.’

Thoughts were slow in his tender skull, tumbling awkwardly over one another, felt as if through a film of gauze. He could only see their shapes and shadows in outline; sense what he should have known.

_Jyn …_

He hurt too much to panic as he grappled weakly with consciousness, but he forced his eyes open. He didn’t have to think, but he could see.

Baze and Chirrut leaned against the wall and watched, draped in darkness, but Cassian could see Chirrut’s smile. When he opened his eyes again, they were gone. Two figures slept, seated at the bedside with heads propped atop crossed arms; one by his waist, and another on the opposite side near his feet. The one by his feet was Bodhi, snoring softly; his dark hair clean and tied back so neatly that Cassian almost didn’t recognize him. His hands twitched and shivered even when he slept.

Jyn shifted, a tendril of hair pulling loose from behind her ear. She wore scrubs like his, was _hurt_ like him – but she slept, unconcerned with even pain. She had carried him out of Scarif while wounded, and he’d done nothing but make it worse for her, harder – she might not have been injured at all if not for him. If she’d been able to watch the perimeter – even better, if he’d been watching it with her.

She made a small, sleepy sound. Her eyelids fluttered. For a moment, he thought she’d wake up and see him watching, but the moment passed, and her breathing grew slow. She should be in her own bed. That she cared enough to hover --

A swell of terrible affection took hold; impulse undiluted by the part of him that knew better than to want. It hurt to move, but he inched his hand across the mattress until it bumped hers, brushing her skin with his fingers before curling them over her wrist. Too weak to hold, so he rested.

He slept.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> holy crap thank you so much to everyone who has read, kudo'd, subscribed, bookmarked, reviewed, messaged me on tumblr about this, etc! i'm completely blown away by your support. i'm also having an absolute blast writing this story, so now that the holidays are over you can expect more soon :)

Jyn always marked the exits.

She collected them. She was so deft at her catalog that she could speculate the likeliest fight based on the number and position of each in a handful of seconds, and she was usually right. It gave her a plan, settled the jittery instinct etched on the back of her skull. You never knew when you were going to have to make a break for it, and it was better to be prepared.

 _Maintenance hallway behind the middle bacta tank. Probably a dead end._ She craned around for the head medic and her obnoxiously prim hairdo, or any of her loose-lipped minions, with their datapads and suspiciously blank expressions. _Schooled_. Someone had told them to keep it flat. One caught her casting around intently and shot her a look dripping with disapproval, by now familiar with her escape attempts. Jyn stared back, unblinking, until he looked away.

Maybe she should have played up the exhausted patient; reclining weakly against the pillows and offering each passing medic a wan, yet brave smile. Potentially effective, but the prospect left a bitter taste in her mouth; she’d rather fry her brains with her own blaster than appeal to pity.

(Technically, Cassian’s blaster. Which he hadn’t been using. Waste not and all.)

It wouldn’t work, anyway. The whole thing made her nervous. She wasn’t being treated, she was being _kept –_ for questioning, almost certainly, perhaps detention.  Mothma had apologized for what they’d done to her and her father, but that had been before Scarif, before they’d absconded with the Alliance’s best operatives on an unsanctioned suicide mission into the heart of Imperial territory, all for a set of plans they had yet to recover. 

She swallowed, closed her eyes. Set it aside.

It was possible the plans had been received by now, but Jyn didn’t think so; the Alliance would be treating them much differently if they were heroes. Right now, their treatment screamed _daycare for_ _dangerous morons._ Which was true, in her case, but unfair in Cassian’s. Completely untrue for Bodhi – who was neither dangerous nor a moron.

Shouts in the other room, throughout the mainfloor – too strident to be laughter. A medical droid down the hall beeped indignantly. Cassian’s bacta tank burbled across the room, and he floated within; a vague humanoid shape in opaque liquid, freeing her of the details onto which she’d begun to fixate – the way his hair slightly curled at the nape of his neck, his swallowing eyes.

Warm fingers brushing the back of her hand.

Even the memory made her face burn. Today she’d woken to chaos: her back and side aching, the head medic lecturing herself hoarse in Jyn’s ear, (“You are going to hemorrhage again if you don’t stay still and rest!”), but of more pressing importance was Cassian, still sleeping, his fingers curled around her wrist. Her heart dropped to her feet, and she flinched away from him before she could think better of it. Holding her breath, she waited for him to open his eyes and look at her and know what she was thinking and the heat, that rising heat, burning her alive, but he didn’t stir. Only then did she exhale.

“Fine,” Jyn had said to the apoplectic woman, easing back into bed and tucking the sheets around her trembling legs. “Look, I’m staying.” She was winded, anyway.

It was a relief when they took him to the tanks for his daily infusion. Cassian in silhouette wasn’t as dangerous; flat, swallowed by the absence of light, easily ignored. Shadows didn’t have warm fingers, didn’t chase a shiver over your skin.

Jyn flopped back, counting the patterned depressions on the ceiling for the thirteenth time. Bodhi should have been back by now. She’d asked him to reconnoiter the base, and after some coaching he’d nodded, straightened his shoulders, and left. She imagined him wandering the base with eyes pitted wide, like she’d asked him to scout an Imperial installation naked. Maybe there wasn’t a difference for Bodhi.

Her side still ached. She clutched at it absently and resumed her scan. Medics made the rounds, a maintenance droid beeped dolefully as it swept over the fiberplast floors; deeper inside, the whine of fighter engines crescendoed to a scream that drowned out even the conversations in the next room, rattling the ancient stones around them.

 _This entire base is an exit_ , she thought, chewing on a hangnail. The foundation of the ziggurat opened to the jungle outside, stone floor angling down into squelchy dirt, perpetually damp from the midnight rains. _Not very defensible._ She wasn’t being kept under armed guard, not closely anyway; if she really wanted to, she could nick a maintenance uniform, slip through the crowd, and boost a ship before anyone knew she was missing. That was an exit she’d used many times over the course of a short, violent life, and she’d do it again in a heartbeat. If she had to.

She wasn’t so sure she didn’t have to. _Where are the plans?_

She jiggled her leg, watching the doorway. How long had she been stuck here?  It couldn’t have been more than a few days, but time crept by slowly, dragging its feet – a month might have passed and she wouldn’t be surprised. The scent of wet earth filled her nostrils, even this deep into the base, bringing with it a pang of nostalgia before she shoved it down into the dark. But a few memories crawled out anyway – her mother, defiant at gunpoint, then sprawled bonelessly in the dirt, and how close Jyn had come to sharing that fate, at the hands of the same man. Her father on Eadu, choking on his last breaths: _there’s so much I want to tell you._ The man in white, and all he’d stolen from her. She remembered Saw and Daggar and Vix, Ralen’s Nine arrayed around her; they were her limbs and she their heart, before she’d cut it out. Chirrut’s smile, Baze’s steady gaze, both like a comforting hand on your shoulder. Kaytoo’s vocabulator cracking on his final command. Cassian disappearing into whistling darkness, the sound his body made slamming against durasteel, her own scream caught and sour in her throat. Something white-hot cut through her, blooming fire through her shoulder and abdomen.

Cold sweat prickled on her brow. She’d been a lot better at not remembering the ugly things before the Alliance broke her out of the labor camp, before she’d gotten involved in their fight again. Now it was too much for one person, too much to swallow, too much to hold inside.

 _I have to get out of here._ She couldn’t fight strapped to a medbay cot, with orderlies hovering like gnats – flight was her only option.

It was different when she had a mission; something to aim for, something to do. In those days, it was easier to see everything behind you like a road, a place you’d trod over and left behind, irrelevant but for the fact that it brought you to your goal. Lately, her past crowded her, a gathering shroud.

There was no goal here. Her task was to sit quietly and wait for her body to decide it was as sick of sitting quietly as she was. Anxiety crawled down her neck, creeping on feather-light antennae. She didn’t even know if they’d succeeded or failed, or if they’d be returned to duty or punished, or thrown into prison.

Old reflex, instinct solid as muscle _; I need to get out of here._

The need scraped against her nerves; an itch she couldn’t scratch. Capitulating, her gaze swept over Cassian’s tank. His hair swirled around his head like a dark halo, and he pressed one palm flat against the glass, as if bracing himself against consciousness. For a moment, she thought his eyes were open, and he was watching her as intently as she watched him. A spike of adrenaline shot down her stomach before the light shifted, and she relaxed.

 _You’re seeing things_.

That was the trouble with saving someone’s life; it made things awkward. Especially if you’d put yourself in danger to do it, and you’d done it more than once; worst of all if you barely knew each other, but almost felt like you did, somehow. You remembered the things you told each other when certain that you’d lose the chance for them; you clung to each other knowing without knowing that it was right, that it fit. But they’d made it off the beach, and now they had to live with what they had learned. Jyn looked at the man she’d nearly killed herself to save, the man who had saved her more in a week than anyone ever had, who had come back for her when everyone else had left, and felt something treacherous rise in her heart, unsteady, something dangerous.

She decided it was gratitude. She had to tell him what his kept promise had meant to her, then she could be free of it. He deserved to know in unambiguous terms, even though he was a liar. For a liar, Cassian had a surprising level of comfort with the truth, when it suited him. He was good at putting important things into words that didn’t clatter or irritate or miss their intended target outright, but she charged into delicate conversations like a brawler, eager to spill some blood. Better to bludgeon your way out, or better yet, avoid entirely.

How could she tell the difference between what was genuine and whatever came from behind his masks? Like _welcome home_. She couldn’t let herself think about it too long or she’d get so irritated that no amount of walking could soothe her. What was he _really_ trying to say? Was it an offer, or an expectation? Brows flattening, she turned away from his tank and stared hard at the pocked mesh pattern of the wall. He probably got off on being cryptic. Part of being a spy; the more incomprehensible, the more difficult to crack.

 _Still annoying._

She was too edgy for the medbay – for sitting in general, regardless of where. She needed to move, push the stalled memories aside for more pressing problems, pretend that she saw nothing, felt nothing. She wouldn’t run; you didn’t have to run away from your real home, if that’s what this was. Instead, she’d throw herself at the mercy of Alliance command and beg – she would beg if she had to. _Please, please give me something to do, anything._ If the plans were lost, she’d find a backup, search for her father’s writings, if any remained. It was probably impossible; he’d destroyed so much of his research before they tried to run from the man in white. But resolve hardened her heart. Galen Erso’s life’s work, his most fearsome invention, his cage; she’d destroy it before it destroyed anyone else. She would bring it down if it was the last thing she ever did.

She fantasized about that for a while.

Only bustling on the other side of the room broke her reverie; a pair of medics initiated the drain sequence on Cassian’s tank, murmuring amongst themselves. She was familiar with this part of the procedure. They drew a curtain around the tank and input something on the console (3 2 2 8 was as far as she’d figured through the pitches alone – she’d have to poke around the hardware for a better beat). There was a lot of rustling and some banging, and a low curse from the taller of the medics – a sandy-haired man her father’s age. Soon they would bring an unconscious Cassian back to his bed, by which time she would be pretending to sleep until the rubbernecks left. But today a new sound shattered the routine; a low groan.

“Does that hurt, Captain?”

“’m fine.” Almost too hoarse to understand. He cleared his throat. “Thank you.”

He probably wasn’t, she thought irritably. He’d downplay a severed limb if he thought something more important needed the attention; he might even do it on principle, for all she knew. Maybe the fussing bothered him. She wasn’t much of a fan, either.

She threw herself back in bed, gasping when the sudden motion ripped through her tender side. Worse than the pain was the knowledge that the pushy head medic was right, not that Jyn would ever tell her as much. She closed her eyes and forced herself to be as still as possible until after medics had helped Cassian across the room and back into bed, and their soft conversation faded to a whisper at the end of the hall.

She put it off only for a few heartbeats. When she opened her eyes again, she found Cassian watching her. A little thrill jolted her heart.

“Are they gone?” she asked him.

He had to clear his throat again. “What?”

“You have a better view of the hallway than me.”

He lifted his head as much as he could. “I don’t see anyone.”

Grinning, she tossed aside the sheets and slipped out of bed, her toes curling against the cold floor. Hooking her foot around one of the legs, she dragged the stool Bodhi had used over to Cassian’s side and perched there, strangely eager. Even so, she was careful not to make any sudden movements; the last thing she wanted was to wince in front of him. She knew enough by now to know he’d probably overreact.

“You shouldn’t …”

“What, are you going to bust me?”

He smiled like he was trying to swallow it, like he thought the gesture was imprudent, an indulgence he didn’t deserve. “Not this time.”

 _What a jerk._ But she couldn’t form the words around her own ridiculous smile. He was bruised and battered, but there was something so vital about him, too – she saw it out of the corner of her eye, when she turned her head – his gaze was steady as mountains, certain even now. He was whole and safe, and smiling _, really_ smiling now, not even trying to swallow it anymore. Her fears evaporated; she leaned over and threw her arms around him, holding him close.

She didn’t notice it at first: This was not like hugging Bodhi. His cold, damp hair pressed against her cheek, and his skin was clammy from the bacta, and he smelled like he’d been bathed in ethanol, but none of it was disgusting like it should have been. He was holding her too tightly. His breath warmed bare skin, where the neck of her scrubs had pulled slightly askew, and she shivered.

She pulled away too quickly and winced when the motion tweaked her tender side. He saw, of course; the overreaction built in his expression like stormclouds. “You _are_ hurt.”

“Ugh, stop.” She flapped her hands at him, arranging herself carefully on the stool.

“I thought I’d dreamed it,” he said hoarsely. “Or -- I’m sorry –“

“Just stop, seriously. I’ll be out of here before you.”

“Jyn …”

“Please.” She was going to grab his hand if she wasn’t careful. “You can’t sit here and apologize for something that wasn’t your fault after you saved my life, it’s ridiculous. It’s absolutely stupid. I won’t accept it.”

He fixed her with the look she hated, that handprint gaze, and goosebumps erupted over her arms. _Probably another interrogation technique._  

She rallied. “Look. When I was Liana, I broke my leg in three places. Here, and here, and here,” she said, demonstrating, and narrowed her eyes. “And I had to hop a few fences with it trying to escape. I’ve been hurt worse than this before, so stop looking at me like that or I’ll stop talking to you.”

“Like what?”

“All pitying, like I’m on death’s door. I hate it. I was barely hurt compared to everyone else. Except for Bodhi.”  

“Hm …” His expression went smooth, politely nonplussed. “How _is_ your side?”

It hurt, of course, hurt to breathe too deeply, move around too much. Not that he needed to know. “It’s fine.”

“Really? You’re wincing a lot.”

“Are you seriously going to interrogate me over this?”

“I’m just asking.”

“You’re insufferable.”

He had the audacity to grin. For whatever reason, she couldn’t summon the appropriate ire; maybe because it was nice to see him smile like a normal person, like he had no secrets. “How are _you_ feeling?” she asked before he could distract her again. “You’re the one who fell twelve stories. They told me you broke three bones.”

He shifted slightly, curbing his smile and controlling his expression – far better than she ever could, that rotten liar _._ “I’m alright.”

“You --!”

“I am,” he said. The absence of guile in his eyes made her suspicious. “I’m not in much pain. We’re alive. We shouldn’t have survived but we did, because of you. So, I’m alright.” He looked over her shoulder for a moment, studying the room, before turning back to her. “Did Command get them?”

He didn’t need to specify. “I don’t know. No one’s told me anything.  I don’t think they did, though.”

“Why not?”

She shrugged, craning around. They were still effectively alone, their only company the unconscious soldiers hooked up to life support, but the back of her neck crawled. “The way the orderlies have been acting.  Dead faces, like someone told them to keep it flat. One of them is really bad at it, though.”

“Which?”

“I don’t know his name! Sandy hair. Chin like a hydrospanner.”

Cassian’s lips twitched. “He could just not like you personally.”

“Why? I haven’t said anything to him. I don’t do anything but sit here and die of boredom. Sorry, _heal_. But he knows who I am – he does, okay? You’ll see for yourself when he comes back – and since I’ve only been on base twice it’s because he knows what we’ve done. And none of them seem all that happy about it, so we must have …” Her voice broke, clamping down on the last word.  

She could no more dismiss this dark thought than the others orbiting her fear; they had risked it all for nothing, gotten people killed just to fail. Eyes burning, she scrubbed at her face and turned away from him. She didn’t want to watch him realize the horrible truth; he’d lost a friend on a fools’ errand. She hardly wanted to know it herself.

“I’m sorry about Kaytoo,” she said anyway.

He was quiet. The sheets rustled as he shifted again, one hand clenching into a fist before relaxing. She noticed he had no left thumbnail. “You expect it,” he said at last, heavy with resignation. “You do what you can to stop it, but you still have to expect it.”

She knew too well. “Yeah.” _How many friends has he lost like this?_

Her face must have given her away, for he regarded her with new focus. “It’s like I said, Jyn. I’m alright.” And the way he said it made her think he meant _I will be_.

This time she couldn’t stop herself from grabbing his hand, squeezing it tightly. “Right.” He was warm, she noted distantly, even though the room was cool enough to raise a chill on her arms. She still wasn’t sure about the Alliance, but he almost felt more like his promise of home than anything else, like he could be if she stopped moving long enough to let it settle, take root.

The thought unnerved her. She pulled away and folded her hands in her lap, wincing when the motion tweaked her side. He probably noticed it, but he didn’t make a scene; this time, his expression softened with something that might have been humor. “How did Liana break your leg that bad?”

 _Interesting way to word it._ “Speeder crash,” she said, a little sheepish. “I’d just boosted it too.”

“Did you at least make it off the lot?”

It was like he’d read her mind. “That’s not important.”

He gave her that stupid swallowed smile again; he probably tried to hide it for her benefit this time, which was even more annoying. “Right.”

She kind of wanted to hit him. “Shut up. Look, I was thirteen. I wasn’t that good at it yet.”

“That’s fair. Just a little disappointing. Your file made you sound like a prodigy.”

He was teasing her, had to be. Now she _really_ wanted to hit him. “Prodigies make mistakes too, you know. _Sometimes_.”

“Right, sometimes.”

“Are you really telling me you never karked it bad on a mission? Never got hurt in a stupid way? And don’t bother lying to me, because I know you have.”

“You _know_ , hm?” 

“I do.”

He was quiet for a long time, his brows twitching low over thoughtful eyes. She forced herself to remain very still, afraid she would scare him off with any sudden movements, chase off this uncharacteristic mood. “When I was Kerrick Bahr –“

She’d expected him to offer up something from before his time with the Alliance, when he always wore his own name; the transparency from an avowed liar delighted her. “Is this from one of your missions? Should you be telling me this? Do I need to sign something?” 

His exasperation was nearly palpable. He sighed, turned away from her. “Never mind.”

“Come on, tell me about Kerrick Bahr. That’s a terrible name, by the way.”

“I didn’t pick it out.”

“ _Right_ , of course.”

He shook his head, but she could tell he was fighting a grin. “When I was Kerrick, I was – well, they have us kissing up to local rebels and anarchists when they find these cadres because it’s a good way to find recruits; people who already know how to fight and have a reason to hate the Empire. Like with Saw? That’s most of my work when I’m on Acquisition.”

The last time he’d spoken so frankly about his life they’d been screaming at each other; she’d forced herself not to care then, but she had no such shelter now. A little thrill chased up her spine.

“I was …” A pointed look. “Somewhere. The guy I was trying to convince had spent his entire life sneaking on the other side of the law, even in plain sight sometimes, and it took me a few weeks to convince him things wouldn’t be the same with the Alliance as they were with the Empire, or even the Republic. He had a lot to say about the Senate; I think he might have been an aide before the Republic fell, or a plant. We never found out for sure; he was ridiculous, but he had a real talent for ghosting. He was one of the few leaders of these cells I found that didn’t do any of the fighting himself; he said because he had some bone disorder, but I think he liked that he could convince people to do what he told them to, make them feel like it was what they wanted all along.

 “Anyway. He didn’t trust me at all but he thought my persistence was amusing, I guess; he thought a lot of things were amusing. He decided that he was going to make sure the Alliance was serious about accommodating his ‘needs’ before he brought it up with his people, so we had to work for it. ‘His’ people, he said that a lot, not like he was looking out for them but bragging about a credit collection.”

“You sound so fond.”

“I wouldn’t have talked to him at all if I had any choice in the matter, let’s just put it that way.”

 _Ever diplomatic_. “What did he make you do?”

“He started me out gunrunning, had me sabotage a few Imperial supply lines, the usual kind of thing. But he started dropping little hints that it wasn’t enough, that he wasn’t going to just sign away his people for the standard, he needed to make sure we were _really serious_. I wanted to cut my losses; I’d been there for two months and was no closer to recruiting him and his cadre then when I’d first arrived, but Command wanted this guy and his people. There were nearly five hundred of them, trained and angry; I’ve only found one cell bigger than that. And – well, it was a few years ago, and we were pretty desperate. We didn’t even have a base then.”

_We, we, we._

“The problem is, I didn’t know what he meant – really serious. I’d been giving him everything he asked for, pulling off ops that would have made my handler cry. They were as close to perfect as you can get – I mean, we were _really_ desperate. He wouldn’t tell me what he really wanted, either. Kept hinting around that we should be able to pick up on what he needed if the Alliance was worth the commitment. So I was sitting around his dumpy base, feeling sorry for myself –“

“You?!”

He shrugged in appeal. “I was eighteen, and desperate, and _miserable_. Two months is a long time to waste; I needed to finish this and get to the next assignment. So, I got it in my head that maybe he wanted me to look after the base itself; it was the only thing I could think of, because I’d done literally everything else. He wanted his people taken care of, right?”

“No,” she said, covering her mouth. She was going to laugh.

“Anyway, that’s what happened. I was fixing the roof and fell and broke my collarbone.”

After the lengthy windup, she expected a similarly detailed account of his injury, but it was good that he’d let the truth sit on its own; before she could tamp down on it, a bark wild laughter escaped her. “Are you kidding?”

He rubbed his neck, as if remembering. “You asked for a stupid injury.”

She shook with badly-suppressed laughter. “I’m sorry, I’m not laughing at your pain.”

“That's exactly what you're doing.”

“Not like that. Come on, it’s kind of sweet.”

He tilted his head. “Sweet?”

 _Kark it._ “You spent all this time with a dangerous cadre led by a narcissist, and when he asked you to really impress him your conclusion was home repair. It’s sweet. Do you even know how to roof a house?”

“I looked it up on the HoloNet.”

“Are you kidding me? That’s even worse!”

He scrubbed at his darkening cheeks, and that was kind of sweet too, incongruous in such a dangerous person. Not a tactic; just the man blushing beneath. “He thought it was so funny he agreed, which I never understood – I guess maybe me being pathetic and desperate made him feel important. He sent a third of his people with me when I came back to the fleet. And while I was laid up, I learned for real.”

“Seriously?”

“Sure. Recovery is boring. And you never know who you’ll need to impress.”

He did understand; he was just better at hiding it. “It _is_ boring.” Or it had been, before he’d regained consciousness. With a start, she realized that she hadn’t felt the familiar restlessness twitching in her thoughts for their entire conversation, and it shook her. “I –“

His head snapped up, keen gaze trained toward the hallway. “Someone’s coming.”

Someone who would probably give her a hard time for being up and about. Hissing in pain, she scrambled back to her bed and arranged herself as convincingly as possible; arm draped over her wounded side, eyes closed, breathing as slowly as she could with a racing heart. She barely managed to complete the deception when the approaching footsteps cleared the doorway.

But it wasn’t the head medic or one of her sour-faced minions. “General Draven,” said Cassian, his tone smooth as glass, and her heart sank.

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

**INTERCEPTED TRANSMISSION 5A-23V9**  
**//complete decryption//**  
_where’s that damn shipment? gekzt is gonna have my ass if we’re not on time this month._  
he might cut you a break. y’know, if you ask all nice, like. he’s pretty understanding for a trandoshan.  
_uh huh. means he’ll tell me how he’s gonna blow my head off before he does it._  
well, if it means I don’t have to look at your ugly mug anymore--  
_cute. how about you handle the dropoff, you little pile of staga sh--_  
<< gekzt is gonna have to go without this month. we need to get the hell out of here. >>  
_captain?_  
what’s going on?  
<< forget the damn procedure, get this can off the ground n—!>>

~

Whenever he felt uncertain or afraid, Bodhi gravitated toward the hangar. There was something soothing about the sound of engines crescendoing in a closed space, loud enough that you felt it in your bones, and its absence unnerved him. He crept through the wide ziggurat halls, twitching the smell of damp dirt out of his nose, until he saw pilots milling around, slouched on cargo crates and nursing steaming mugs of caf. Behind them, the ships loomed like weary birds of prey, sagging in their struts.

He peered up at a row of X-Wings, something like need twitching in his hands. He entertained no delusions: his temperament was wholly incompatible with that of a fighter pilot. In the heat of battle, he was likely to choke; he’d almost certainly get himself killed, and that was if he was lucky enough to avoid taking down his entire hypothetical squadron with his ineptitude.

But it made him feel better to wander among the ships, cocooned in the warmth of cooling engines. Tentatively, he reached out and brushed his palm against the duralloy hull before flinching back; still hot from patrol. A good burn.

It reminded him of better times; the academy and his old friends, the exhilaration of success despite towering odds – races through crumbling canyons, weaving around churning stormclouds with banks thousands of feet tall, veined with lightning. It reminded him of his instructor’s rare praise, how earnestly he’d sought it, how satisfying it had been to distinguish himself, to be good at something _terrifying_. It reminded him of a time before he knew any better, when Imperial Shuttle Pilot had been a job and not a statement of complicit acceptance.

It almost allowed him to forget the morning’s interrogation.

They came for him before the medical droids’ early rounds and led him through a winding passage, rebuffing his increasingly panicked questions with grunts and one word answers, if they bothered to respond at all. They hadn’t put a bag over his head or bound his hands, but Bodhi was a seasoned hand at interrogation by now, and he knew that their permissiveness didn’t necessarily mean anything good. It probably meant something bad. His heart floundered against his ribs like a dying bird.

The pair of soldiers brought him to a circular room where a woman in fatigues waited, scrolling through the contents on a datapad with furrowed brows.  The room alone made Bodhi nervous -- its walls were coated with moss and creeping vines half-concealed by shadow, making him shudder; the presence of soldiers and their sternly blank expressions brought him to the brink of collapse.

The woman indicated for him to sit, and he did. She introduced herself as Commander Calum. She asked him endless questions – _Where were you trained? Names and posts of your officers? Corroborate these Imperial procedures_ – and noted his stammering answers on her datapad. She asked him about his family, if there was anyone in the galaxy that knew or would miss him, and he told her there wasn’t. After hours of pressing, she set the datapad on the table and leaned forward, lacings her fingers together.

“What do you want, Bodhi Rook?”

He couldn’t remember the last time someone had asked him that question. “I ...“

She cut through his waffling. “You defected from the Empire at great personal risk, and brought us information that will help the Alliance to –“

“The plans?” he asked, ears perking. He still hadn’t heard anything about it. “You got them? The Death Star plans?”

She studied him for a moment before continuing. “You’re currently a non-combatant in custody of the Alliance. We can’t let you leave or brief you on sensitive information but we can give you something to do, or officially induct you into the Alliance, if you wish. So, again, what do you want?”

He thought of Jyn and Cassian in the tower, staggering into the surf; he remembered the helpless need twitching in his hands as the silence on the comlink went on and on. “I want to help,” he blurted. “I want to fight.”

He regretted it five seconds later. He didn’t know anything about fighting. He’d barely passed the physical portion of his flight certification; too small, too skinny, too weak to be of any use. He’d probably just get in the way with his stumbling, like he had on Scarif. Still, he wanted to help. He owed it to Galen, and Tonc, and Baze and Chirrut. He owed it to Jyn and Cassian. And he would _try_.

After that, he swore his oaths – _to serve the interests of the Rebel Alliance, to protect its people, to resist and undermine the cruel authority of the Empire in any way possible_ – before he was assigned to a barracks on the far east side of the base. He had no belongings to move aside from his Imperial pilot’s jumpsuit, with its frayed collar and juma-stained sleeves, so he folded it neatly and set it in the shelf next to his bunk. It felt like bad luck to throw it out.

He wandered – through the mess hall, around the commons, before finally rounding back to the hangar. He felt like people were watching him, their whispers crawling through his jittery thoughts, though when he craned over his shoulder to catch them in the act, nobody was looking. He was unseen in a sea of milling soldiers, each consumed by their own concerns. They all seemed to know each other.

He watched the group of pilots by the crates. One slapped the other’s back so hard that caf spilled over the rim of his mug, to the delighted screeches of his companions. It made Bodhi strangely homesick; not for a place, not exactly. He couldn’t explain it. His friends from the academy were dead, as was his family, and they had been for years. He couldn’t remember his mother’s voice anymore, or his friends’ laughter, or what Rann’s lips had felt like, couldn’t remember if time and shame had robbed him of these memories or if it had been Bor Gullet, rifling through his mind like a thief, carelessly discarding whatever failed to capture its interest.

Cold sweat broke out on his brow. He groped for his goggles, fidgeting with the twisted strap until his hands calmed.

Another chorus of shouts shook Bodhi from his reverie, but these were different; afraid. A group of technicians ran past. In the distance, an astromech droid shrieked indignantly when someone crashed into it.

Foreboding soured his stomach.

~

 **INTERCEPTED TRANSMISSION 2F-834A**  
**//partial decryption//**  
_are you saying it’s gone? the entire planet?_  
there’s barely any dust left. ZZZZZZn just told me and the ZZZZZZZ.  guess they g-ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ  
_how are they going to play that one with the senate?_  
he said it’s not going to be a ZZZZZZZZ.  
_whatever the hell that means._

  
  
Cassian buried his mounting apprehension under a mask of calm. He knew that expression, could read its variants in a heartbeat; Draven had especially bad news. Whether it related to Cassian’s insubordination, he didn’t know.

“How are you feeling?” Draven asked, and the answer crystallized. The general never wasted words on small talk and courtesy, especially not concern for its own sake; he wanted to know because he needed Cassian for something.

Cassian hitched one shoulder, stifling the wince. “Well enough, considering.”

“Good. That’s good.” One of the tanks bubbled loudly enough to make him flinch, and a medic strode into the room on squeaky shoes, checking the comatose patients, yet both failed to penetrate Draven’s uncharacteristic distraction. He rocked back on his heels and crossed his arms over his stout chest, lips pursing.

Cassian’s unease deepened. He knew he should wait for his superior to broach the subject, but he couldn’t swallow his desperate curiosity any longer. “Did you get the plans?”

Draven’s expression hardened, his gaze drifting over to Jyn’s bed. “We’ll discuss the details when you’re out of here, but … no. _Tantive IV_ was intercepted en route. We’ve been monitoring Imperial transmissions and it doesn’t sound like they’ve recovered them yet, but frankly it’s only a matter of time.”

Something shifted in his peripheral vision. His thoughts whirled, facts bursting like firecrackers behind his eyelids: _Tantive IV_ had been Princess Leia Organa’s ship; the hard copy had been lost, a smoking ruin in the tower console, or destroyed in the retreat, he couldn’t remember. For a moment, the cost flooded his analysis, threatening to drown him – so many ships lost, so many of his comrades dead; Baze and Chirrut, and K, all for nothing, all to _lose_.  

He was tired.

“I understand,” he said.

Draven exhaled slowly through his nose. “If this wasn’t a patchwork operation and we hadn’t just lost a third of our forces, I would have to punish you for your insubordination.”

 _Interesting way to put it._ “But you’re not going to.”

“No,” said Draven. “The situation has changed.”

Unease sharpened into dread, carving him from the inside out. “Sir?”

What little of Draven’s reserve crumbled, and Cassian was left staring at a man he didn’t recognize; beaten, desperate, exhausted. There was no sign of his focus or steadfast nerve; it might never have existed at all. “We’ve been picking up transmissions all day. Comm traffic was heavier than usual; we thought it was because of Scarif at first, but then we started picking transmissions up from civilians and privateers. And when we finished decrypting …” He exhaled sharply. “Alderaan has been destroyed.”

“... The entire planet?”

“Yes.”

The magnitude of the truth took a long time to settle. He saw Jyn’s fingers twitching out of the corner of his eye, curling into a fist. _She’s a terrible actress_ , he thought distantly, and then it hit him. The Death Star was fully operational. Alderaan had a population of over two billion. Senator Bail Organa had recently travelled there to shore up support. He closed his eyes, swallowed the memory of a spear of green light penetrating the frigid desert, Jedha crumbling beneath them. The loss of the city and its people had crushed him; an entire planet …

He took a breath and opened his eyes. “What do you need me to do?”

The answer was immediate. “Refit,” said Draven. “Resume operations.”

Cassian could do that much.  

~

  
  
**INTERCEPTED TRANSMISSION 2D-858C**  
**//partial decryption//**  
 i know how you get before academic board review but please try to remember your poor wife and son and how much they mZZZZZZZZ.  
yes, I’m teasing. mostly teasing!  
please do write soon, though.  
you must be very busy! of course ZZZZZZZ ZZZZZZ. we just miss you very much.  
maybe you’re still up in the mountains. were the local ZZZZZZZZZ friendlier?  
i hope you didn’t go alone this time.  
i will call your director if she ZZZZZZZZ ZZZZZ.  
please write back soon. naffy, we’re --  
please write.

 

Bodhi trailed after the technicians, wiping his sweaty palms on his fatigues. A group of people congregated at the entrance of the temple, ankle deep in mud as they clustered around a transponder. Pilots killed the engines one after another before leaping out of their fighters. It was dusk already; clouds streaked pink and purple and gold, veiling the red curve of Yavin above. In the distance, birds shrieked, erupting out of the leaves.

He moved as if in a dream. He already knew, somehow; knew beneath his bones, in the place where hope and fear lived. Someone was crying. Someone kept smacking the transponder.

“What is it?” someone asked. “What happened?”

Someone choked on a sob – a mechanic, crumpling to the ground with her face in her hands. Someone hissed in fury. A chorus of whispering, muttering, moaning.

A bead of sweat trickled down the side of Bodhi’s face, tickled his neck. It was too hot on this moon.

“May the Force be with them,” someone murmured.

 “Shut up!” the sobbing mechanic snapped. “Just shut up.”

He knew; he knew what happened. He didn’t want to know.

“What’s going on?” he whispered to the guy next to him, but the man only shook his head, and Bodhi wandered further into the throng. He knew already, he knew what had happened, yet a weak part of him hoped. He could be wrong. It could be anything.

Whispering: “It’s gone?”

“ … The whole planet?”

Ice froze in his gut. Each truth cut at him with brutal precision, until he was skinned and bare, his weakness cracked open, his failure. There was only one thing in the galaxy capable of such destruction. He’d waited too long. He was a coward, and now an entire planet was gone because of it.

He floated through the halls, crept back to his bunk and slipped inside, cramming the pillow over his ears.

~

 **INTERCEPTED TRANSMISSION 4E-13C5**  
**//complete decryption/** /  
_i can’t keep doing this._  
_i can’t sleep._  
_a whole planet, you know? a whole planet._  
_they didn’t even give them any warning._  
_just boom, gone._  
you need to encrypt these better, stupid.  
they’re going to dump you in reorientation again.  
_we skirted the debris field after. there was barely anything left._  
_you could hear little stones plinking on the hull._  
_they didn’t even tell them what they wanted._  
they wanted to blow up the planet.

 

Draven didn’t stay for much longer; with a curt nod, he turned on his heel and strode from the room, his boots squeaking down the hallway. Maybe he really had come by as courtesy, however small: better to hear the truth than a garbled rumor from emotional sources; better to process the situation from as objective a standpoint as possible.

Cassian retreated to the cold place in his mind. There was work to do.

He needed to heal faster – it didn’t matter that he’d just woken up, he’d already been here too long; he might be able to convince Ula to increase his bacta exposure, he always had a high tolerance for toxins, and he could be persuasive when it was necessary. He would need a new ship – he might be able to steal one, to lessen the burden on Requisitions, might be able to shuttle to some poorly-occupied station, a backwater planet, someplace vulnerable to breakage. He would need a crew – at least one other, a copilot, maybe another operative if Draven was sending him into the fringes for deep operations. He needed a handful of new identities, needed to talk to one of his forgers, needed to go to Coruscant –

Jyn sniffed.

He was dragged back to the present in a rush of sensory input; the dimly lit medbay, his body thrumming with ache, the building migraine driving a hot spike between his eyes, _Jyn_. He knew from a cursory look that she was trying to do the same thing he was and failing; she jammed the heels of her hands into her eyes as if to shove the tears back inside, her lips twisting against the building howl. She trembled with barely-suppressed rage.

That made it real. He couldn’t plan from a distant place in his head while she cried, while she collapsed under the weight of it. “Jyn,” he croaked.

“Stop! Just – stop.” She choked on a sob. “Don’t get up.”

It was almost funny that she knew he’d been about to try. _Fully operational. Two billion people._ Bile clawed up his throat.

She forced herself upright and clutched her side, her wince warping into a snarl that raised the hair on his neck. Her fists clenched again and again, as if she longed for a target to present itself, something she could punish.

“We have to destroy them,” she whispered. Destroy, not defeat. The weapon and its wielder.

_We._

“They – they can’t – and my father, he –“ Another caught sob. “My father –“

“We will,” he whispered back.  

She looked at him, then. She was not a pretty crier; her cheeks had gone splotchy, nose red and streaming, raw, ragged eyes. She’d dragged his broken body halfway across a hostile moon while wounded and hadn’t crumbled, but this was a different wound. Layered, ceaseless injustice could break even the strongest people, correctly applied.

She looked as furious and devastated and lost as she had after Eadu, and it nearly broke him too.

But they understood each other now. He couldn’t come to her, so she came to him; slowly, mastering her wince of pain. She took his shaking hand, gripping it so tightly that his fingers creaked, but he didn’t flinch. Her eyes blazed, ran him through. “We will,” she repeated, like a promise between them, a threat to the rest.


	5. Chapter 5

“Bodhi.”

He woke with a gasp, flailing upward, and smacked his forehead on the beam above. “Ow—!”

_“Shh!”_

It was Jyn, of course. He rubbed his smarting brow and squinted up at her. “What are you doing?”

“I’m waking you up.”

“I mean, what are you doing out of the infirmary.”

A breezy shrug, but Bodhi saw the lie behind it. “I can move around today. _Carefully_ ,” she emphasized in a snotty tone, a fairly accurate mimicry of the woman from the medbay. “I have work to do. More vows to swear, evals to take. You have them too.”

“More vows?”

“Well you take the big one first, declaring intent. I did that last night. Then I think you have to put your mark on a lot of records.” She noted his expression. “What are you so upset for? You did the hard part already.”

Bodhi groaned, pushing his face back in the pillow. Only the prospect of flight could fill him with this specific combination of anticipation and dread – the need he felt to fly twitching in his thoughts, burrowing like an itch, in forever conflict with the dumb, animal part of his brain that urged _slowly, carefully, cautiously,_ the part that flinched from unnecessary risk.  

A headache pushed at his temples, twisting tighter with each heartbeat. He’d been up late drinking, trying to forget the shroud of space dust and debris that marked the place where a planet had once been, where innocent people had gone about their business, where billions of years of history had settled in the stone; they’d never done anything wrong, they’d just been trying to live –

Jyn settled a hand on his shoulder and offered him a stubborn smile. Solicitude overcame him; she was trying to outrun those thoughts too. “Come on. If we hurry, we’ll get the good rations.”

Bodhi sighed, pushing himself up. “There are no good rations. They all taste like cardboard.”

“Some of them taste like old cardboard, though. Wouldn’t you rather have your cardboard fresh?” 

He snorted. “When you put it like that.”

He dressed quickly, throwing an old jacket a Requisitions officer had found for him over his jumpsuit, pulling it straight over his shoulders. It was faded navy and far too big, and smelled overwhelmingly of ship fuel, but for some reason the combination soothed his nerves. He made his bunk according to regulation before he remembered he didn’t live by those regulations anymore. But the habit made him feel better too.

It was early enough that they passed the night-shifters on their way to the cafeteria, rubbing exhaustion from their eyes after a long patrol. Most of them hadn’t even bothered to change out of their flight suits yet. The cafeteria was similarly deserted; a wide room with a low ceiling, plastene draped with vines and moss. A cool breeze swept through the open doors; the benefit of permanent shade. He went through the ration line while Jyn wandered off in search of caf, and they reconvened at a table in the corner of the hall, far enough out of the way that they could watch the goings-on without being disturbed.

She bent over the mug, inhaling deeply. “I haven’t had caf in months.”

Bodhi could barely imagine a day without it. “How did you survive?”

“Spite,” she said easily, and he snorted. The longer he thought about it, the more he knew she wasn’t joking.

Breakfast was as unappetizing as he had promised; gelatinous protein cubes in a purple gel that tasted strongly of the tube it’d come in. But he was encouraged to see a pair of officers eating the same fare at another table, gesturing with forks as they spoke. The Imperial officers he’d served with always had an ample supply of luxuries, even in the middle of a desert, even when their own supply-lines were strained by the rebellion: real fruits and vegetables, fresh meat whenever they wanted. Once, Bodhi’s garrison Commander had decided that he deserved something really special after his latest dissident purge. Bodhi thought his options were limited, since his every meal was already a decadent feast, but the Commander managed to surpass even his most negative expectations; he’d brought in a professional bounty hunter and sent an entire expedition into the deep desert in pursuit of a local legend: the flame-winged ixiral. Kids told stories about the ixiral, the judge of souls, the herald of fire. Guardian of the sands. _Make your bed or the ixiral will eat you! Help your mother with dinner or it’ll suck your eyes right out of your head! You better not be lying. The ixiral can see your heart; didn’t you know that?_

Legends were supposed to be hard to find, but the expedition caught the ixiral in two weeks, and Bodhi had only the briefest moments to marvel at the creature, the legend made flesh; it tossed its wide feathered head, struggling to free iridescent wings roped to its powerful body, plum and flame and burnished gold. Its stare was intelligent, strangely keen, as if in that moment it saw straight through him better than anyone had or ever would, right to his coward’s heart. The Commander boasted of its deliciousness for months.

It was good that everyone ate the same crap food here. No one had any illusions. No one had to prove a point. The hitch between Bodhi’s shoulders slowly began to loosen.

“Maybe they’ll have me running cargo here too,” he sighed.

She swallowed a rude mouthful of food. “You really liked that work?”

“Why do you say it like that? Like it’s some kind of punishment?”

“Because it is. Or it would be for me, anyway.” She bounced her leg. “How don’t you get bored?”

“It was actually kind of peaceful. I was usually alone, and – and I didn’t have anyone telling me what to do, or – or breathing over my shoulder, or any of that. It was just me and the ship. And the cargo, I guess. The crystals. Those were the best times.”

Jyn smiled at him. “They might assign you shuttling here, since you have experience. It makes sense.” Her grin acquired an edge. “Better make sure you impress them today.”

He swallowed. “You think they’re going to be picky?”

“They could, who knows. Probably not. But it doesn’t hurt to try and give them a show.” She stared down at the tabletop, her eyes unfocused. “Maybe they’ll cut us a break if we have skills they can use.”   

He’d come to expect that heavy pragmatism, but not how unnatural it sounded in her voice – not instinct, but scar tissue.

They bussed their trays and set out toward the hangar. Commander Calum had instructed him to report at 0800, which was much later than Bodhi expected; even so, the base was already full of soldiers and pilots and technicians, bustling about their duties. They seemed especially grim today; most had the pinched expressions of people who hadn’t slept very well the night before, and their gazes were distant, pinned to an indistinct horizon. One tech didn’t notice her partner calling her name for nearly half a minute.

Bodhi was not imagining the stares. As they wove through the milling soldiers, he saw up close; disgust replaced weariness, suspicion overtook grief. Their gazes followed Jyn and Bodhi through the base and all the way outside, and he felt the intensity of their judgment tingling between his shoulder blades, like a laser testing flesh.  

Jyn felt it too. She settled herself carefully on a crate, holding her side. “That’s familiar.”

It was the last straw. “What are we doing here?” he whispered frantically, hugging his arms around himself. “What did we expect, seriously? They weren’t going to be happy even if we did come back with the plans, some of the Council members would have just thrown us in the brig for breaking orders and stealing equipment and getting people killed, and we didn’t even manage to pull it off so they’ll really –“

“Look,” she said sharply. “We have to own this. We can’t creep around here like we’re waiting to get kicked, ‘cause then we set ourselves up for it, like we think we deserve it, and we _don’t_. We didn’t make the wrong choice – it just went bad. Okay?” She set her jaw stubbornly, to better mask the uncertainty in her eyes. “It wasn’t the wrong choice. I don’t know about them, but now – now I’d rather go down fighting.”

He was never sure he believed her, but he wanted to. “Okay.” He would _try_.

“I’m serious. Walk with your chin up. We were fighting for them; for everyone. We _are_ fighting for them. They can’t make you feel like a villain for that.” The way she said it made him think _Imperial_. “And Alderaan … we’ll make them pay for it.”

That much he could agree with. They would pay for _everything_.

“Anyway, we’re not going to have to deal with them for much longer,” she said heavily. “Either we end up being right, or they stick us on some crumbling Mid-Rim front to get us out of their hair. Come to think of it, they’ll probably stick us there anyway.”

“Separately, do you think?”

She smiled sadly. “Probably.”

They sat in silence for a long time, watching the dawn light spill over the treetops like liquid gold, coating the shimmering leaves. It was cooler today, the sky heavy with an approaching storm; Bodhi pulled the old jacket tighter around his shoulders and took a deep breath, letting the charged air settle in the bottom of his stomach. He could almost pretend he and Jyn were alone, that no one could see them and judge them and hate them without knowing how much it had cost them, what they had left behind on the beach.  It was their fight, too. Their loss.

“How much longer is this guy going to keep us waiting,” Jyn groused. “Isn’t it about that time?”

Bodhi checked his chromometer. “About. Are you nervous?”

“What’s to be nervous about? They’re just checking to see what you know. I’m sure they’ll test my aim, proficiency, reverse-engineering, the like. Probably if I’m any good at comms tech.”

“Oh, I’m pretty good at that!” Bodhi said brightly. “I always got high marks at the Academy.”

“Yeah, well, not all of us got to go to _school_ ,” she said with affected ire, her lips twitching. “Some of us were eating garbage in the gutters while you were off getting a fancy education and –“

“Alright, alright, I – I get it. I’m sorry.”

She nudged him. “Then again, I’d rather eat garbage than go to an Imperial academy. Did they beat you if you got the wrong answers?”

“Oh, yeah. They did that for a lot of stuff.”

_“Seriously?”_

Bodhi nodded. “One of my friends got caught in the kitchens after curfew and they put her in isolation for three days. She was always kind of different after that.”

The humor drained from her expression. “Why do they do that to _you_? I mean random civilians, okay I get it, but you’re all part of the military.”

“That just means we got more of it. Well, not more, but differently. We’re not supposed to be people that mess up. We’re parts in their machine.”

She shook her head, shivering, and her shoulder brushed his again. “It’s nice to be your own piece. Part of something, but still you.”

He almost thought she sounded wistful. Before he could ask her about it, though, she forged ahead. “I might just tell the instructors I know what Cassian knows, only better.”

Bodhi could imagine the look on his face. “Do you?”

“No, definitely not. Not all of it anyway. All that procedure …” She made a dismissive gesture. “I bet he has the whole handbook memorized. And I’ll never do the spy face. You know the one, right?” She tried to stifle all the emotion in her features and failed. “I know about the good stuff, though. I could pick his pocket without him noticing, even if he was watching out for it, and I’m better at hotwiring, slicing … Hearing about it would annoy him _so much_.”

“Uh huh.” Bodhi wasn’t so sure. He’d seen the way Cassian looked at her.

They were so engrossed in their speculation that neither noticed a stranger approach until he was standing right in front of them; a mechanic, going by bulky vest. An angry one, going by his face. Bodhi flinched.

“What are you doing here?” the mechanic asked sharply, looking over his shoulder before back to them. _Checking if the coast is clear?_ Adrenaline spiked through Bodhi’s veins.

“We’re _waiting_ for the instructor,” she said, as if speaking to a toddler.

Cold slid down Bodhi’s spine. He knew in that animal part of his brain; the mechanic was spoiling for a fight, and Jyn wouldn’t back down if threatened. He touched her arm. “Hey, I think we, uh, we forgot –“

“Sit down,” the mechanic snapped. “Let’s have us a talk. You’re the ones tried to steal the plans?”

“We _did_ steal them,” Jyn said with cutting disdain. “We got them offworld.”

The mechanic’s rough features contorted with loathing. “Yeah? Then where are they? You have them in your pocket? You hiding them? Because otherwise no one knows anything. No one’s seen these _mysterious_ plans that are supposed to save the entire Rebellion from certain destruction yadda yadda. It’s convenient.”

“What’s that.”

“Just saying. I think that little stunt you dumbasses pulled is the reason why the Empire’s pulverizing planets now. Can’t let a disgrace that big go unpunished. You brought this on us and you don’t even have anything to show for it. And now they have a real reason to wipe us out.”

“A _real_ reason?” She got right up in his face, though he was almost a foot taller. “Like they don’t make up a bunch of those whenever it suits them. If you think they were waiting around for specific justification, you’re an idiot,” she spat. “They destroyed Jedha because they wanted to test their new toy. They’ve been doing whatever they want because they can for years.”

“You might as well have painted a target on Alderaan,” the mechanic snarled. “What better place to make a point? Since you got them thinking like they better make one before we get all uppity, breaking into high-security Imperial complexes and costing them billions of credits without them even knowing it.”

Bodhi didn’t mention that the Empire had destroyed Jedha because of Saw Gerrera, and because of him, because of what he’d put in motion. It had been _right_ , the right thing to do, he knew it in his heart. He couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “It doesn’t matter what we do, alright? They’ll hit back at us anyway. They do it over nothing, so we – we have to do something.” A chill covered his arms, even in the jacket; he knew better than anyone what the Empire deemed acceptable justification for their crimes.  

Jyn’s feral grin widened. “Which you’d know if you excavated that bloated abscess you call a head from your lower intestine. Maybe it’d fix your charming temperament –“

It happened in the blink of an eye. The mechanic swung; a crack shattered the air, and Jyn went sprawling in the mud. She was up before Bodhi even knew what was happening, snarling, her face a mess of blood. 

Several truths registered instantly; she would attack the mechanic, she would hurt him badly, she would get in trouble. Before she could charge him, Bodhi caught her around the waist with one arm and hauled her back, nearly unbalancing them both as she swung around. With his other hand, he shoved at the mechanic, hard enough that the man stumbled. Fury made him loud: _“Stop!”_

“The plans are on their way,” Jyn said, pinching her nose, and she fixed the mechanic with a look of wild hatred. “And _we_ stole them. We risked everything when you all wanted to give up, when they told us to just wait around for the end like a bunch of kids that don’t know any better than to – to hide. We wouldn’t’ve had to go behind the Council if they hadn’t ordered us to run or lay over and die.” Her voice went hearty. “We lost our friends too, and we still actually _did_ something. So, when the plans get here, you all better remember that.”

“Practice speech in the ‘fresher? Or while you’re soaking up bacta we coulda used for _our_ people –“  

“What the hell is this?”

Bodhi nearly wept in relief. A man strode toward them; his steel grey hair ruffled in the wind, and he wore a faded orange jacket that barely concealed his stocky figure, like he’d been smaller in his youth and couldn’t accept going to seed. His stare was keen, sharp enough to cut yourself on its edge.

Jyn wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “I slipped,” she said nasally, jerking her chin over her shoulder at a pile of crates. “This one had something smart to say about it.”

“Sure,” said the mechanic, departing with a vicious look. “Watch where you’re going.”

“Thanks, _friend_.”

One silver brow arched into the instructor’s hairline, but after a moment he seemed to think better of intervening. “Do you need to get that looked at?”

“No,” she said, fishing through her pockets for a rag and wiping her bloody hands clean. “Could we get this started? I’m supposed to be resting.”  Her tone had its own edge.

~

Their tests went all morning, and well into the afternoon; Bodhi couldn’t remember the last time his breadth of skill had been so stringently examined. Not even his entrance into the Academy had been this thorough. Since he and Jyn were the only new recruits on base, they sat in a small room while the instructor introduced himself as Lieutenant-Commander Kurn, before lecturing them on Alliance procedure and sending them through a range of simulations.

Shuttling cargo from Jedha to Eadu had been relaxing, but after a few runs he could have done it in his sleep; for the first time in years, he was squinting at hypothetical readouts and figuring calculations in his head before tapping them into the datapad. Jyn had been right; they were tested on everything, from their combat knowledge and experience, to equipment maintenance, knowledge of droids, to their proficiency at janitorial work – someone had to upkeep the base, after all. Bodhi was starting to get cozy with the idea when Kurn herded them back outside to the hangar.

Foreboding and anticipation tangled inextricably in Bodhi’s gut. He wanted to fly more than anything, needed it more than air, but there was a small part of him that associated examination with discipline, a waiting punishment for failure. Kurn looked normal enough, but so had most of the Academy’s instructors before Imperial stricture had scrubbed them clean.

“There’s a canyon a few kilometers southwest,” Kurn was saying as they strode onto into the back of the hangar, where a row of older ships were waiting for maintenance. “I’m gonna have you buzz around and back, show me what you can do.”

He could do that much. He could. This was nothing, child’s play. He’d piloted a covert mission through the Scarif shield gate and gotten at least some of the infiltration team off the planet alive; he’d outraced the dread sand hurricanes of Jedha with failing instruments, tossed his fighter from cloud to crackling cloud as the storm danced beneath him.  

“It’s a step up from junk,” Kurn said, indicating a ramshackle fighter – an outdated X-wing, Bodhi remembered after a moment. “That way if you scrap it we aren’t losing that much.”

The implication was deafening: _we wouldn’t be losing that much in you, either._ Bodhi swallowed. “You don’t have any sims?”

“Does this look like the Imperial Academy to you? We’re making do with what we have.” A sour look. “We don’t have to vet most of our recruits either.”

 _No one ever stole any flight sims?_ He supposed there were more important things to steal.

With one last nervous look at Jyn, (one she returned with an encouraging smile), he hauled himself into the cockpit and settled the headset over his ears. The interior smelled vaguely like cheap alcohol and smoke, probably left over from a mechanical fire. He suppressed a groan; he was likelier to die due to equipment failure than user error, and that pleasant rattled around his itchy brain the entire time he taxied through the hangar and onto the tarmac. It seemed absurd; he’d survived so many ridiculous things in the last week alone, a veritable handful in unbelievable succession, only to be killed by a faulty fighter.

Kurn’s voice crackled over the comm when he’d cleared the base. _“Alright, now get yourself familiar with those controls. They’re not too different than what you’re used to, yeah?”_

“Not that much.” Older, certainly.

_“Give me the rundown.”_

“It’s all the same, just in different places.”

_“Good. Prepare for flight check.”_

With practiced, almost unconscious surety, Bodhi performed the procedure as he knew it; checking master power, ignition, the fuel gauge, testing the stick between his hands, checking emergency indicators, listing each as it passed muster. Already he forgot the stink of smoke and alcohol, the sagging seat cushion, Kurn’s waiting voice on the comm. This carried the awe and earnest discipline of a ritual, and it must be observed. The sky waited for him.

_“Alright, Rook, you’re clear.”_

His fingers tightened over the stick, and the engines responded at once. For such an old, beat-up ship, the controls were thrillingly sensitive to pressure and weight, as much as his shuttle had been. Out of habit, he tugged his goggles over his eyes, and the last vestiges of unease fell away.  

Another twitch of his fingers, and he rose; slowly cresting the top of the ziggurat before leaning gently on thrust. The engines crescendoed around him like a song, settling deep in his chest where it would live until he could sing it again. He took the ship at a circumspect pace over the tops of the trees toward the canyon Kurn described, though every impulse in him screamed to pull back on the throttle and shoot forward like a beam of light, gone before they could blink.

It only took him a half hour to find the canyon; a deep wound in the verdant green, stretching out far into the hazy horizon. He was about to hail Kurn when the comm sputtered to life. _“Rook?”_

“I’m here.”

_“Listen, we already know you can buzz from point A to point B, but we want to know what you can really do, so run the length of the canyon and keep as low and tight as you can. Remember, if you run into trouble you pull up. Do you copy?”_

“I copy,” Bodhi said. His hands shuddered.

_“Alright Rook, let’s see it.”_

He didn’t take off immediately. He let the moment settle, stretch; he clenched and unclenched his hands three times before gripping the controls. The ship was in him; buzzing in his bones, his blood, shivering at his back. The canyon loomed before him, its depths beckoning as if in challenge. _You remember what it’s like, don’t you?_

Before the fear could catch him, he tugged the throttle, and the X-wing surged forward as if it had been waiting, as if it had needed the flight as much as he did. Lateral Gs pinned him to his seat. The canyon walls rippled in his peripheral sight, but he focused his gaze to the shifting point before him. He was a live wire, his awareness active, nearly painful; each thought connected to action before he consciously decided. Each twitch of his fingers and the ship responded, left, right, roll, pitch and yaw, until Bodhi could no longer tell the difference between them; he might have been mechanical himself, his blood made of fuel, his brain an astrogation chart.

 _I’m the heart_ , he thought. _I lead._

He accelerated until the canyon walls were a red blur, framed by green and faded blue. He was barely aware of Kurn on the comm, barking warnings; for a moment, he was ten years old again, quick and foolish and brave, he was wide-eyed as the desert streaked past him, as he and his mother dove deeper into the crumbling canyons of Jedha, threading them like a needle. Bodhi did so again, in remembrance.

Too quickly did he reach the end. With a whoop, he pulled out of the canyon and shot toward the faded sky, until the black of space leeched all color away. Because no one could tell him any differently, he did a barrel roll for the sheer, giddy joy of it, and laughed until tears streamed down his cheeks.

 

~

After Cassian’s latest bacta infusion, Ula gave him permission to move around a bit. “With this,” she amended quickly, brandishing a cane at him. “You still have to be careful.”

“I’m always careful.”

Her expression told him just what she thought of that.  “Maybe it’s better you stay put for now …”

He was already halfway out of the room. Before she could interject again, or restrain him, he offered a small wave over his shoulder and turned the corner, hobbling down the hallway and into the base at large, the thrill of freedom making his heart race.

It was slow going. He didn’t tell Ula that it hurt to move because he knew she’d force him to rest another day, or worse, stick him back into the tank. Putting weight on his left leg was still a challenge, and if he leaned on it too long the dull ache rose to pointed discomfort. But he was tired of the medbay, and especially tired of hour after hour spent submerged in viscous liquid, whirling thoughts his only company and distraction.

Jyn had been, too, before she left early that morning. ‘Left’ implied a controlled interaction; the minute Ula’s back had been turned, she rocketed out of bed and out of sight. His laughter bubbled to the surface of his tank; the memory entertained him for at least a few minutes before his uncompromising internal monologue took over again _. Two billion people. Fully operational. Refit, resume operations. “Goodbye.”_

It would be nice to get some fresh air.

Dusk settled over the jungles of Yavin IV, bathing the moon in a rosy, subdued light; the planet’s subtle influence. He let the sound of a dozen conversations and idling ship engines wash over him, the distant scent of fuel and burnt rubber and overheated ration packs fill his lungs – probably one of the pilots trying to get creative while on patrol again. No one would look at him, which he preferred. Maybe they didn’t recognize him without his usual mask of flat calm. He’d prefer that too.

Already his hip ached. He set his jaw, swallowing the welling frustration. It was taking him too long to heal; he could spare only a few more days before he needed to get back to work. Draven’s uncharacteristic vulnerability had alarmed him; he realized a few hours after the general’s departure that his visit might have been more for his reassurance than Cassian’s benefit. There was a list waiting for him, and it grew the longer he floated uselessly in a bacta tank, wasting time.

He was winded after only two laps around the base. Sufficiently irritated with his weakness, he turned and shuffled back toward the temple. As he approached the entrance, however, he caught a glimpse of two familiar figures huddled on a pile of crates, heads together in conference. After a moment, Jyn threw her head back with laughter, and his heart leapt at the sight. He wondered what Bodhi had said to inspire such delight.

Watching them together, he knew his earlier hunch had been correct; if he had pulled the trigger on Eadu and Jyn had come after him, Bodhi would not have been far behind. But when they saw him on the periphery, they broke out into matching grins, and Jyn beckoned him over. He noticed with dismay that she had a black eye, and her nose was crusted with dried blood. There could be only one explanation.

“Making friends already, I see,” he said, and settled himself awkwardly beside her, an enforced, circumspect distance. Fussing would only annoy her. 

“It wasn’t my fault! Bodhi, tell him.”

Bodhi bit his lip before glancing away. “It wasn’t … well, not the whole thing.” 

“Nice! Thank you so much for your support.”

“He did start it, though. He said –and – well, it’s just that you said –“

“It’s not important,” Jyn said, with a quick look at Cassian. “I don’t even remember what he said.”

Cassian kept his expression neutral, though the beginnings of a smile threatened. “So how many pieces did you break him into?”

“One,” she said bitterly. “ _He_ stopped me before I could do anything.”

Bodhi shrugged. “You would have really hurt him. And then they really would dump you in the brig.”

“Even though he started it!”

“You’d have finished it.”

“You bet I would have,” she muttered sourly.

“So who was this unfortunate person?” Cassian cut in.

“Why do you ask me that? I don’t know his name! I don’t know anyone here except for you two and the Council.”

“What did he look like?”

She didn’t even have to think about it. “Hair like fertilizer, hatchet face; the kind you really want to punch. I bet even his mother wanted to punch that face.”

He snorted, and filed the assessment away for further investigation. “I’m almost afraid to ask how you’d describe me.”

He didn’t know why he said it, or why it mattered. Before he could tell her to forget about it, she fixed him with that intense stare, that razor gaze, the one she probably didn’t even know she had. He was unprepared for such a thorough examination, and it took considerable willpower to keep himself still, unblinking, even when her eyes met his.

“You have the face of a friend.” Her lips curved, not quite a smile, but it could have been. She looked away, cheeks coloring. “That’s what Baze thought.”

The mentioned of one of their dead cast a somber pall over the conversation; each retreated into silence, remembering. He’d never gotten the impression the old guardian liked him that much, though maybe it wasn’t a matter of liking, just truth. He was humbled, and more than a little unnerved. It seemed like a transgression that his deeds didn’t mark him for what he was.

K would have found it ridiculous; he always thought Cassian’s moralizing was kind of pathetic, the way you regard a concussed animal that can’t help but hurt itself. His distress had more to do with Cassian’s, not the inherent sin. His loyalty was to people, not arbitrary moral concepts.

For the first time since they returned from Scarif, in this one, small moment, he let himself really think about K. He wondered what the droid would have made of their escape, their failure, the ridiculous lengths Jyn had gone to save his life. That would have gone a long way toward winning him over, not that he’d ever say as much. Gently, he pushed those thoughts away. He would let himself remember later, when he was alone, when there wasn’t work to do. He would remember as K deserved.

It occurred to him later that she hadn’t answered the question: _How would_ you _describe it?_ Perhaps he was better off not knowing.

Jyn’s shoulder brushed his; a heartbeat from leaning, he a heartbeat from letting her. As they sat in companionable silence, a junky freighter soared over the whipping treetops.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so I really love bodhi.


	6. Chapter 6

Bodhi remained for only a little longer before he pushed away from the crates, rocking back on his heels and twisting his hands. “He might come back,” was all he said as he departed.

It seemed like a weak excuse to Jyn. “If he comes back, it’ll be to finish _me_ off,” she called over her shoulder. “Well, he’d try, anyway.”  But Bodhi had already reached the temple, flinching around a group of technicians before disappearing within.

The thought of the mechanic still rankled, worse than her smarting nose and puffy eye. The injustice of it, and the shame; he had been a spitting, red-faced manifestation of her greatest fears, the sinking realization that they’d fought for nothing, that it had done more harm than good. She rubbed some dried blood off her throbbing nose, scowling through the pain.

She had decided the moment she saw Cassian hobbling toward them; she would spare him this as long as she was able. It was going be a challenge; Cassian was freakishly, _irritatingly_ astute, and the task would be all the more difficult without Bodhi’s nervous energy as a distraction (or his presence as a buffer, she thought with a pang of unease). But this was necessary kindness; the least Cassian deserved from her, and she wouldn’t cheat him out of what he deserved.

 _Gratitude_ , she reminded herself.

She needn’t have worried. Before she could stumble over a clumsy, insincere overture, Cassian provided one for her. “You were supposed to come back to the medbay hours ago,” he said mildly. “Ula’s going to be upset with you.”

“Is she ever not upset? Have you ever seen this woman smile?”

“She’s been known to.”

She looked away, gazing over the shivering treetops. Sunset caught in their leaves, like a thousand smudgy mirrors in fading light. “Don’t make me go back yet.” She stretched out her legs in emphasis. “Are you so eager to climb back in your cage?”

An odd look crossed his features; it might have been sad, or wistful, even wry. “Not eager, no.”

She pretended not to see it, and that it hadn’t made her stomach clench. She groped for a retreat. “Yeah, you understand. You have a lot of work to do, after all. Refitting, resuming, the like.” The words came out sharper than she intended, unearthed by anger she hadn’t realized existed. “Who could stand to sit around with all that waiting for you.”

 _Moron._ It took every ounce of willpower she possessed not to pinch the bridge of her nose. She’d been trying to avoid hard subjects; fitting that she should blunder into the worst.

–  

Cassian studied her with an attempt at clinical distance. He was good at this. Part of his job necessitated an accurate read of one’s character, what they might be thinking, often at a glance. The slightest shifts of expression could betray the truth if one knew what to look for. And when it came to that instant assessment, he was particularly adept.

At least, he had been.

Jyn eluded him; sometimes he only saw the depth and intensity of emotion blaze in her eyes, not the source, the reason. He only saw that she was upset; not why.  It frustrated him more than he liked.

“It won’t be right away,” he said, shifting slightly to alleviate the pain in his hip. A non-answer. “I won’t be capable of much for at least a few weeks. Though, I don’t know. Maybe they really are that desperate.”

“I’m guessing they’re really that desperate,” she said, watching a group of pilots jog toward the hangar. “If Draven is putting you back to work without even giving you a slap on the wrist.”

“He’s not really like that. Not for it's own sake, anyway.” It was as true as anything, not that Jyn would believe it. “I think he approved of what we did.”

She shot him an incredulous look. “Are you serious? He’s fine with it?”

“He prefers action over inaction,” Cassian said. The decisive solution; swift and brutal. They fought against an entity as entrenched as it was ubiquitous, run by those unhindered by inconveniences like compassion; they didn’t have the luxury of caution.

Jyn rubbed her nose again, shifting away. “I’m well aware.”

 _Shit._ “The Council wanted to dissolve the Alliance. After everything we’ve done, everything he’s ordered us to do – he’s no more eager to accept that it was for nothing than I am. So, I think he approved. I don’t know if he’s right to approve, but –”

–

A rush of anger flooded her. “You know, if he’d just –“ At his expression, she clamped down on it. _Gratitude_ , she lectured herself. _You’re supposed to be distracting him._ Why did she have to bring it up? She was the stupid kid picking at a scab until the scar grew a quarter-inch thick.

“If we’d saved your father,” Cassian supplied quietly.

Well, if he was going to insist. She rounded on him, temper snapping in her veins. “We wouldn’t have needed to break into the Scarif facility. My father would have told us where the weakness was and exactly how to exploit it and no one would have had to – we could have avoided that whole –“  She took a trembling breath. “You already know this, don’t you?” Draven had ordered him to assassinate her father and he hadn’t; undoubtedly for pragmatic reasons.

Cassian had gone very still. “It’s like you said,” he echoed. “We could have had the plans from the source.”

His distance alarmed her, but she pushed past it; better not to ruminate. “Exactly. What’s the use of an Intelligence department if you’re going to blunder ahead anyway? The point is finesse, right? The point is avoiding this kind of …” She made a vague gesture. “Thing.”  

Her looked at her with those awful sad eyes. “Jyn –“

 _Damn it, he’s going to apologize._ She wanted to shove him off the crates, or run; she sufficed with interrupting before he could make things worse. “I’m not angry at you, I’m angry at _him_. Well, not at you anymore, since you didn’t. You _thought_ about it. But –“ That wasn’t exactly true either. The words welled within her, and she stuffed them down too, shoved them back into the dark: _Don’t lie to me again._ She couldn’t bear it, but she didn’t want him to know exactly how deep it had cut her, how badly it had hurt. She wouldn’t be able to tell him why. “Draven wants you to resume operations; what does that mean?”

She’d stumbled close to the heart of it; a place she hadn’t known existed. Only speaking it aloud made it real.

–

This _is what’s bothering her._ Fair enough; it had been bothering him too. Before, he’d taken disconnected satisfaction in accomplishing an objective with as little effort and few resources possible because it allowed him some distance from what he had done; a shameful retreat, and a necessary one. Now not even the method could obscure the objective. It would follow him. “I don’t know.”

She pinned him with a stare so intent it made him shiver. “What do you want it to mean?”

She asked him like it was nothing; like he had the privilege of being picky about it. Maybe he did now. “I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do. Stop being diplomatic.”

“Is that what I’m doing?”

“Stop doing that too. Turning my questions around on me. I hate it.”

He swallowed a smile. A part of him liked that she was starting to figure him out, another part feared her understanding. But honesty was too tempting a prospect to resist (camaraderie, _connection_ ), and he rode the lightness of the moment. “Scarif might have gone wrong but … it felt good to do something straightforward. While we were doing it anyway.”  

“Infiltrating an Imperial security complex is straightforward to you?” She bit her lip against a grin, and the effect was so disarming that for a moment he could think only that it made her look almost new; a lovely stranger, someone he needed to know. The need lingered like ache in his chest.

“As straightforward as my work’s ever been.”

“I imagine.”

He shook his head, picking at a catch in the plasteel handle of his cane. It was a betrayal to even think it, a transgression against everything he’d given and all he’d worked for, but it grew in him the longer he left it unspoken; a shameful weed choking soil. He was drunk on confession. “I don’t know that I want to go back to unstraightforward things.”

 _We don’t have the luxury of wants._ But it wasn’t a matter of want, not truly. He bore his crimes as a collective, and details roiled beneath his surface memory, mingled with revulsion, the crushing weight of guilt: things he set aside to function as he had to. She had uncovered them, laid him bare. Without his knowing or her meaning to, she had robbed him of the capacity. She had ruined him. 

_Have you been ruined?_

–

Sunset haloed the treetops, slipping beneath the horizon, and the shape of Yavin above them saturated, a blunt red curve bearing down on its satellite. A breeze ruffled his hair, and she bit down on the unconnected impulse to brush it out of his eyes. She could, if she wanted. She was close enough to feel the heat of his skin, his bare forearm, close enough that she could grab his hands, fold the warmth of them between hers, etch it on her bones. Let him live there. If she wanted.

She didn’t. It was gratitude that choked her, relief that made her dizzy. This was _sorry_ and _thank you_ and _I have your back._ It was relief that made her speak:

“Maybe you shouldn’t.”

–

He didn’t want to. He wanted to do good, help people. He once thought that doing so required monstrous compromise from him, that victory could only be achieved through a moral concession, but the slope was too precarious – he’d given too much, grown too cold.

“Maybe,” he allowed. And that small allowance burrowed deep, took root.

He really looked at her, then. Her hair billowed in the light breeze, and the skin around her eye mottled purple and green already, but she wore the bruise like she’d worn them all her life, like a mark of pride. It would have been the most natural thing in his life to take her hand, and that was the worst part; he could have done it without thinking, on impulse alone, the slim hope that she’d have wanted him to, but before the impulse could crystallize her focus dissipated into restless energy. She turned away, cheeks coloring, and the moment passed.  

“Anyway, I’m a member of the Alliance now,” she said, glancing at him sidelong.

“Really?”

“Swore my vows and everything.” She said it with a breezy shrug, but he saw the pride, and the worry. “Not sure what that means yet. I imagine they’ll shuffle me off to some Mid-Rim front after _Ula_ decides she’s tired of tormenting me.”

“That could take a while.”

“Is that a _joke_? From _you_?” She was delighted, and it took him by the heart. “Give me some warning next time.”

“That would ruin the effect.”

“And you care about the effect suddenly, do you? I see how it is. There are no rules when it comes to giving me trouble.”

“I’m sure you feel the same when it comes to me.”

Her grin went impish. “Perhaps.”

This time he didn’t tamp down his own smile. “They won’t put you on a front.”

“No?”

“It would be a waste of your skills.”

“Oh, _really_? What skills are those?”

 _Fishing for praise?_ He’d indulge her; he was feeling indulgent (and slightly concussed). “You’re a good shot, accustomed to working on the fringes with no support, a much better slicer than me if you can crack an Imperial security network in under three minutes. And I’m pretty good.”

“So you’ll put in a good word for me?”

“I’ll think about it.”

He had already been thinking about it, from the moment he’d made his promise. It involved a shameful reshuffling of priorities, concessions he couldn’t afford to make, yet the possibility of it consumed him. He thought of working some straightforward job with Jyn at his side, something he could let himself remember when they’d finished and the day had been won, and a stupid little thrill coursed through him. He was ruined; he’d been ruined the moment he’d seriously considered the possibility, the moment she’d saved him, each time. He’d been ruined the moment he looked at her file.

_Have you been ruined?_

By now, it was dusk; the air had grown almost cool, and kitehawks circled the gorge on the horizon, crying for food. He expected her to retort, but her expression was almost placid, mysterious in its calm. “Come on,” she said when she noticed him looking, and slid off the crates, stretching carefully. “Time to go back to our cage.”  

She held out her hand, and he took it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> plot will return next chapter -- i just really wanted to write them talking XD


	7. Chapter 7

In hindsight, Bodhi should have expected the worst. Things had been too pleasant for too long – he had enjoyed almost six standard hours without something blowing up or crumbling beneath his feet or assaulting his mind, six hours spent in a ship threading the stars, and talking with a friend. It was more than was fair, more than he deserved; he should have seen the reaction coming, the slap that follows a caress. Balance.

He hurried into the east hangar, tailing a group of pilots as they veered deeper into base. Flight technicians raced around them, dragging fuel lines under their arms, and a wailing siren cut through the sounds of idling engines and nervous conversation. The back of his neck prickled with unease. Reflexively, he pulled the goggles off his brow and twisted the worn strap between his fingers, willing his hands to calm. But even the ritual provided no comfort today.

Something was wrong.

He didn’t know how he knew. He wasn’t familiar enough with the base to have memorized the hundreds of routines that powered it; he only knew compared to an Imperial installation, even the backwater one on Eadu, everything was far more disorganized. Just about the only system he could make sense of here was the patrol schedule; the pilots and their days were as regular as a chrono. Everything else was slapdash in comparison: If he’d been a defector _to_ the Empire, he would have never been permitted to wander the base as he had here, not without being extensively vetted. The Alliance didn’t seem to have the manpower for the required oversight. _Or maybe you’ve proven yourself already_ , a little voice whispered. But that was impossible.

The point was, he shouldn’t have known anything; he hadn’t been here long enough. But he knew, at least, that he should follow the pilots; they were the lifeblood of any installation, its eyes and teeth. Barring orders, he would follow the pilots.

They led him to Command chambers, packed with soldiers, officers, and technicians. Bodhi almost didn’t recognize the room without the legion of dignitaries and counselors loudly enforcing their opinions, correct or otherwise. With a start, he realized it had been less than a standard week since he’d been here last, watching Jyn attempt to convince the Council that their best chance was to fight. 

He felt a surge of resentment. Who knew how well Scarif would have gone if they’d gained the support of the Council and began the mission with the full might of the Alliance at their backs. The fleet might have been able to set up a trap, or engage the Imperials immediately as a distraction, allowing the infiltration team more time to breach the facility undetected. He speculated bitterly as the room continued to fill, jostled all the way to the back by those jockeying for position around the holographic projector.

From his vantage point, he could hardly see what was going on. There were too many people – nearly all the base’s personnel, by Bodhi’s estimate – and it was too stuffy to breathe. Dirt mingled with the smell of fuel, poorly prepared field rations; a homesick smell, disgusting in a comforting way. He saw his group of pilots chattering around one of the auxiliary viewscreens; one elbowed his companion when he saw Bodhi watching. Bodhi turned away, face burning.

Near the center of the room stood a young woman in white; she was easily the smallest there, an almost childlike figure among giants, yet she surveyed the chamber with a look of cool command, comfortable in its authority, as if she’d been born telling people what to do. He was instantly wary of her. Before long a wizened man materialized at her elbow, pulling pensively on his white beard. When she opened her mouth to speak, the room quieted.

He couldn’t understand a word. He was too far from the center of the room, and the endless whine of ship engines idling in the background made it almost impossible to isolate complete sentences. Every few moments a fragment would drift back to him – “little time” “heavily-shielded” “snub fighters” – but without context they could have been talking about anything.

Then the wizened man fiddled with the holoprojector, and a ghostly model of the Death Star bloomed above, lazily orbiting the table. “An analysis of the plans provided by Princess Leia revealed a weakness …”  he began, and outlined a path straight to its reactor core.

It took a half-dozen heartbeats for the truth to sink in. The plans. The plans were here. The girl in white – Princess Leia had saved the plans, and now their mission was complete. They had done it. Baze and Chirrut, Tonc, the infiltration team, K2 – their sacrifices hadn’t been in vain. Wild, bittersweet joy rose in his chest like a flame, choking him.

But his relief was short-lived.

“The Death Star is heavily shielded,” said the old man, “and its weaponry and defenses were calibrated for full-scale engagements with planetary defense systems and fleets, but this presents us with an advantage; they are less prepared for an assault by one or two-man fighters.” 

The Death Star was _here_. _Would be here._

No, no _no no no_ , this wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. They were supposed to infiltrate; put together a team of twenty or so experienced agents like Cassian, who were familiar with Imperial procedure and could pass cursory inspection. Maybe pilots like him, who had the Strictures and Structures beaten into them by the instructors at the Academy. They were supposed to break onto the Death Star and plant explosives at key locations, and then set off the explosives when at a safe distance. He’d figured it all out.

But if the Death Star was here, they no longer had the luxury of subterfuge. A last, desperate assault; that was what it had come to. He watched the General gesticulate toward the rotating model of the Death Star, his voice an irritating whine, hovering at the very edge of hearing. 

“We don’t have much time,” said Princess Leia. “The Death Star is approaching from the far side of Yavin, and we must destroy it before it can reach this moon, for if we fail the Empire will show us the same mercy they showed Alderaan.” Murmurs rippled through the crowd; disgusted, fearful, full of rage. A fresh wound to galvanize their spirits.

“May the Force be with us,” said the old man. And with that, the meeting was adjourned. People streamed from the central chambers with focus and purpose in their eyes, steel in each jaw. Bodhi wouldn’t have held a panicked reaction against anyone, but instead every member of the Alliance, every soldier, technician, and otherwise, leapt to their posts with single-minded determination.

For his part, it hadn’t really sunk in yet. The plans were here. The Death Star was on its way. It was going to blast them into component particles, as it had done to Alderaan. He supposed they were going to die soon. There was no way a squadron of fighters could take out the entire Death Star – the product of trillions of credits, decades of research, the entire bounty of Jedha’s Kyber crystals. It was going require an impossibly precise shot down an exhaust port only a few meters wide to destroy, with a very small window of time to do so. Suddenly, even Galen’s flaw didn’t seem like enough of an advantage, or large enough to make a difference. He felt a surge of resentment for him too. Bodhi floated after the pilots, stripped of purpose, his thoughts spiraling into the clouds.

“You,” Kurn said from behind him. “Rook.”

Anxiety spiked through his veins. He hadn’t even heard the older man approach. “Y-yes?”

Kurn wasted no time on reaction or disgust; he took Bodhi by the arm and hauled him through the base, toward the pilot’s lockers. It took Bodhi a moment to realize that his hands were shaking.

“What’s –“

“You were at the briefing?”

“I—“

“I saw you in the back.”

 _Then why ask?_ Bodhi said nothing. He supposed he already knew what this was about. He waited for Kurn to find his way around the words.

“We need you in the fight,” said the older man, as if he were admitting a moral weakness. “Anyone that knows how to fly.”

Maybe he thought it was pathetic to throw a barely-tested recruit at the epitome of the Empire’s might. Bodhi, however, understood; he was well accustomed to desperation. What other options did they have? Mad laughter bubbled in his throat, and he forced it down. “I want to,” he heard himself saying, though he wasn’t even sure it was true anymore; driven by some unconnected impulse, unwieldly as unease. “I want to fight.”

Kurn seemed surprised, but relief chased over his craggy features a moment later, and it made him seem almost hopeful. “Good.”

~

Kurn found an old flightsuit for him; a few sizes too large, faded orange, the ribbed white vest stained with something brown and vaguely disconcerting. Probably blood, Bodhi thought with dismay. That was about the shape of his luck.

He left Bodhi to change, muttering about finding him a functional astromech droid. Bodhi dressed mechanically; shook out his hair and retied it into a bun, folded his fatigues and jacket with distant reserve before placing them neatly in his locker. He took the solitude as an opportunity to lose his mind. He hunched over, elbows atop knees, and put his face in his shaking hands.

What was he doing here? He had to find Jyn and Cassian – neither of them knew what was happening; they could still be outside, enjoying the evening, unaware that the Death Star was rapidly approaching their position, and in the space of an hour it might have pulverized them. They’d escaped Scarif and completed their mission only to be chased into an impossible corner, destined to fail. It was so acutely unjust that a surge of fury flooded his chest; it wasn’t fair that they should struggle all their lives and give so much to have the last of it taken away. Wasn’t right that the Alliance could fight so hard only to be exterminated just as the tide was about to turn. None of it was right.

He was so preoccupied with his anxiety and the crushing wheel of injustice that ground the galaxy to dust that he didn’t notice another changing in the next row over until the stranger nearly trod over him. He was about Bodhi’s height, but blond, and his startling blue eyes lacked any guile or self-interest, or, in Bodhi’s opinion, introspection; he looked at Bodhi with a hungry, patient sort of curiosity, like he’d want to know everything because he cared, and wouldn’t get bored hearing about it.

“Sorry, I didn’t – hey, are you alright?”

“Wh—yeah. Yes. Of course. I’m – I’m fine. Just getting my head straight.”

“Yeah,” the stranger commiserated. “I’m pretty nervous too.”

So he was part of the offensive too. He didn’t look nervous whatsoever. Bodhi’s suspicions deepened. “Are you new here?” He was pretty sure he hadn’t seen this towheaded stranger around base over the last few days, and he’d seen just about everyone in his wanderings.

“Yeah! I just came in with the Princess – you know, Princess Leia?” A little proud, a little possessive.

“Do you know each other?”

“Oh, no. Not yet. We – me and some friends rescued her from the Death Star! See, my uncle bought this droid, and the droid had plans for the Death Star in his memory core, but there was a message from the Princess on it too, she’d been captured, and – well, it’s a long story.”

“You’re the one that found the plans!” Bodhi exclaimed. “We – I mean, my friends are the ones that stole them in the first place.”

“That’s amazing! You’ll have to tell me about it after we blow this thing.”

 _When, not if._ Bodhi couldn't even begin to imagine possessing such confidence; this guy was either a crack pilot or completely delusional.

The stranger beamed and held out his hand. “I’m Luke Skywalker.”

Despite his misgivings, Bodhi took it. “Bodhi Rook.”

“It’s good to meet you.” He tucked his helmet under his arm; standing, Bodhi followed suit. Together, they strode back into the base, weaving through the milling crowd toward the waiting hangar. The engines rose from a background hum to an insistent whine, tangling with Bodhi’s whirling thoughts. The Death Star was here, it had found them, he needed to tell Jyn and Cassian, he needed to wish them goodbye, or good luck, or whatever he believed when the moment arrived. He needed to find them before he took to the sky.

Guilt gnawed at him. They had no idea. He should have found them as soon as he’d learned, or the moment he’d suspected something was wrong. He should have gone back for them instead of following the pilots. He almost didn’t want to tell them; he wanted them to have a few more moments without knowing what was slithering through the dark of space, here to finish what it had started on Scarif. But they would want to know.

“So where did you come from?” Luke asked.

Bodhi blinked. He had forgotten about that patient curiosity. “J-jedha.”

“I don’t know that one.”                             

“It’s … it’s a desert moon, orbits NaJedha. A cold desert. In the Mid Rim?”

For some reason, Luke was delighted by this. “You came from a desert planet too! Mine was hot though. Too hot. I think I might have liked a cold desert.”

Bodhi bit his lip. “I always felt the other way. Or I used to, before I went to the Academy. Cold gets in your bones.”

Luke nodded sympathetically. “Yeah. It’s easy to get sick of what you know. I sure did.”

Bodhi shrugged and turned back to the row of ships, tugging nervously at the collar of his flightsuit.

Luke brightened again. “But you said you went to the Academy? I always wanted to go, myself! Before I knew what was really going on. Were you any good?”

“I – I was alright.”

“You must be good if they let you in.”

“That doesn’t really mean anything.” Nerves made his words trip over one another, too fast to mark. “They were desperate for pilots in the Mid Rim when I joined up, because there’d been some uprising a few months earlier, and a huge battle wiped out almost a quarter of their pilots. Maybe it was more, I don’t remember. A few supply depots were gone too, a lot of ships. That kind of thing. Then they had a big recruitment drive, scholarships and initiatives, made a bunch of promises about debt forgiveness, stuff like that, and by the time I graduated they had too many. So they had me shuttling, since I wasn’t good enough for them to put me in a TIE.”

Nausea twisted his guts to knots. He didn’t know what he was doing, didn’t know any of these other pilots, didn’t know the formations or the tactics; he barely he knew his way around an X-Wing. He was going to get splattered; that was a given. If he was really unlucky, he’d take out a few allies with his incompetence. He might even lose them the entire battle. He’d been a fool to join the Alliance, a fool –

“Hey,” Luke said, clapping Bodhi on the shoulder. “It doesn’t matter what they think. I’m glad you’ll be up there with me.”

“You don’t even know me,” Bodhi blurted, incredulous. “You’ve never seen me fly.”

“Yeah, that’s true. I dunno,” Luke said with a shrug. “I have a good feeling about you.”

“Ha …”

After thinking about it for a while, Bodhi supposed he had a good feeling about Luke too. But Bodhi’s feelings were treacherous, untrustworthy things, liable to lead him astray. He’d felt like a hero when he’d first defected, and he wouldn’t forget how that had worked out.

~

Jyn had gravely miscalculated. It seemed like a good idea to help Cassian back to the medbay when they’d been outside, with dusk stretched over the moon like a shield, sealing them away from their concerns. She had felt distant from herself, almost. That old jittery instinct had quieted, and in the silence foolish impulse took its place. Now, with his hand on her arm and his weight braced against hers, did she realize what a mistake she had made.

It brought her back to Scarif, and the turbolift.

“You should have gone back ages ago,” she chastised, because the silence made her skin crawl, and giving him a hard time was surprisingly easy.  Carefully, she maneuvered them around a whistling astromech droid, noting his wince. “It’s going to take even longer for you to heal now. Weren’t you just telling me you wanted to – why are you smirking?”

“You’re fussing.”

“This isn’t fussing. I’m _lecturing_ you, like you deserve.” Fussing had an uncomfortable connotation, softer than she intended it, motivated from a different place.

His horrible placid smile widened. “You made it sound like you had a moral objection to fussing in general, but I understand now; it’s just when it comes to you.”

Annoyance pickled her mood, tempered with apprehension she didn’t understand. “You think you know me so well that you can make ridiculous sweeping proclamations about my character out of nowhere?”

“Not even close,” he said, too quiet, and it made her stomach curl. She considered forgiving him when he spoke again, perfectly deadpan: “It was an observation.”

That _wretch_. “It’s literally the same thing! You are absolutely horrible. Just because you’ve seen my file a few times doesn’t mean you get to – just – just shut up.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“Yes, you were! I saw it all over your face. You’re not the only one capable of making _observations_.” She wanted to wipe that stupid grin right off his preposterous face. She wanted her heart to slow down. “Why am I even helping you right now? I should let you make your own way back.”  

“Should you?”

“Stop doing that!”

She was seriously considering leaving him to his smug devices when she caught a glimpse of Bodhi hovering by the same X-Wing he’d flown earlier today, staring off into the middle distance. He wore a pilot’s orange flightsuit, and pulled distractedly on one of the tubes dangling from his chest. She noticed his technician’s goggles sticking out of his pocket.

“Bodhi?” she said, waving hesitantly. “What’s going on? Are they sending you on patrol?”

Bodhi blinked at them. “You,” he said. “You – you don’t know. Right, I – okay.”

“Know what?”  

Three blasts of the hangar alarm; the call to the ships. Bodhi flinched, before turning to them, his eyes wild. “The plans,” he blurted. “They – Princess Leia’s here, she made it off Alderaan, she had the plans with her but the Death Star was following her, and – it’s here now, or it’ll be here soon, I can’t – I don’t know for sure. I’m waiting for her to finish. And – orders, I guess. I don’t know – we have to leave now.” A vague gesture toward the mechanic hunched on the base of the fighter, behind the cockpit; she gave the astromech droid a little pat before hopping down.

Understanding came slowly, before lunging at her. “Leave?” Cassian echoed.

“The flaw,” Bodhi said. “Galen’s – we’re going to hit it. There’s a trench … that’s what Red Leader said, we hit it with proton torpedoes and it’ll go up.”

_We._

Jyn shuddered. It occurred to her that she should at least be happy about their mission being a true success, but the Empire had stolen that from her too; in the end, theirs had only been a small victory, futile save for this last chance. Fury and fear churned in her heart, concern big enough to choke on; she hated that couldn’t fly well enough to blow the Death Star straight to hell, that she couldn’t fight when it was needed most.

But Bodhi could fight. He would have to fight for them all.

The hangar siren wailed. A buzzing voice over the PA: _All pilots to their vessels._

There was no time. No time to process, or find the right words that would lend him courage. Had she and Cassian wasted even more time, they might have missed Bodhi altogether. The thought made her sick.

Cassian gripped him by the shoulder, wobbling as he struggled to keep his balance. “You know what you’re doing,” he reminded Bodhi, and a heady rush of gratitude overwhelmed her; of course he knew the right thing to say. He knew people. 

Before she could talk herself out of it, she plunged her hand down her shirt, her fingers brushing against the familiar shape, smooth and sharp and almost warm, before pulling it out and slipping the cord over her head. It had been her strength all these years, and now it would be his. She slapped the crystal into his idle palm, folding his fingers around it. “Trust the Force.”

He looked down at his hand, then up at her, confusion mingling with the dread. “Is this --?”

“It’s to _borrow_ ,” she said fiercely, but her voice trembled around the word. “You have to bring it back and put it here in my hand.” An emphatic gesture. “Okay?”

He blinked hard, and tucked the Kyber inside the neck of his flightsuit, chewing his cheek. “Okay.”  

They couldn’t put it off any longer. Bodhi settled the helmet over his head and hauled himself up into the cockpit, as his astromech warbled anxiously behind. Cassian took her arm again, and they moved away as the drone of the engines increased, loud enough to drown out all thought and feeling, reducing them to base impulse, animal perception. They could only watch, and listen.

“Right,” Cassian said finally, after the ships had left. His knuckles whitened on his cane. “Help me to Command?”

Relief flooded her. In this, they were the same; forced to the sidelines, they would rather know exactly what was happening, even if it was to see the end coming. “Keep up, then,” she said. It wasn’t really a joke, but it could have been, in better times.

~

A squadron of X-Wing fighters surfaced from the atmosphere of Yavin IV, floating above hazy pink clouds before slipping into the darkness of the void. Quad engines glowed like lightflies after dusk, winking as they slipped in and out of Bodhi’s viewport.

Red Leader on the comm: _“All wings, report in.”_

Bodhi closed his eyes, feeling the ship in his bones, his blood. Jyn’s necklace was warm, like it had been left out in the sun all afternoon; a second crystal heart, beating atop his own. With it carried a dozen lifetimes: It was Jedha City and his mother in the canyons, and Rann’s hand on his shoulder, slowly descending; it was Galen Erso folding a message into his hand, a burning, cataclysmic secret. It was Luke Skywalker, and a squadron of allies hurtling through the black of space, the Alliance's last hope. It was Jyn and Cassian, and the way they looked at him, the fear and care and hope blazing in their eyes. He had wanted to help them, and now he could. He could fight for them.

Bodhi swallowed. He felt his pulse throbbing in his neck, but his hands were steady.

“Red Thirteen, standing by.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so sorry for that hiatus, guys! a combination of jerkbrain and health nonsense kept me from writing, but i'm BACK -- regular updates shall commence.

_Red Leader: All wings, standby to lock S-foils in attack position. Red Two, you’re wandering. Form up._

_Red Two: Sorry, boss. My ranger’s acting up, gonna have to go manual._

_Red Leader: Keep an eye on it, Wedge._

_Red Thirteen: Listen, they’re –_

_Red Six: Watch the shield envelope._

_Red Nine: Oof. That’ll scramble your lunch._

_*scattered laughter*_

_Red Thirteen: L-listen! If we approach from fifty-three degrees and take it lateral, it’ll throw off those defense tower scanners enough that we might be able to – to slip in the trenches without being locked on. At least, right away. A few seconds –_

_Red Six: That’s a pretty slim margin for error._

_Red Four: What kind of –_

_Red Five: He went to the Academy; he knows Imperial defenses from the inside out!_

_Red Leader: Alright, cut the damn chatter._

_*silence*_

_Red Leader: We’ll try it your way, Thirteen. You better not be wrong._

_Red Thirteen: I’m not._

_Red Three: It’ll be a short trip if you are._

_~_

In his absence, Command had become a mausoleum.

The shadows were colder today, leeching all heat from the air. A half-dozen figures crowded around the center table; its faint, greenish light cast a pall over their grave features, giving Cassian the disconnected sensation of standing amidst holograms. He recognized Princess Leia among them, but she was so intent on the projection that she didn’t seem to notice anyone. She looked as if she’d aged a decade since he last saw her.

His interest was disconnected from the proceedings, an instinct severed from ability. Radio chatter muffled in the background, as if coming from across a vast distance; pilots called to one another in a language he knew but couldn’t comprehend, their words wreathed in static. He might have been watching everything unfold from behind the plastiglass of a bacta tank, floating in the viscous liquid within.

Only Jyn’s fingers on his arm retained the clarity of sensation, its sharpened edge. Blazing with barely concealed agitation, she made to lead him further into the room but he stopped her. “Here,” he said, pulling free and leaning against one of the plastene monitors, marked with sweeping green lines. He always saw better from the shadows, with his back to the wall. “Leave me here.”

“I’m not leaving you anywhere,” she shot back. The strength of her reaction startled him until he realized he’d echoed himself from Scarif. Memory flooded the room – more visceral than reality, pressing as sensation. It was so much the same: the Death Star bearing down on them, carving through space like a hot knife; Jyn trembling at his side with fear and rage hot in her eyes, and that terrible need he’d seen on the first day – the need to act, to understand. Neither was possible here. 

It was different, too. Before, they had fought under scouring sunlight with hearts in their throats. They had nearly died, but they had _fought_ – they had done something. Here, they could only wait.

_Red Leader: That’s it, we’re through._

_Red Three: Doesn’t look like they’re expecting much resistance._

_Red Leader: Keep all channels clear until we’re on top of them._

Across the room, a monitor flickered to life; two dozen blinking lights with scrolling text beneath each, displaying technical readouts and pilot vitals. Red Five and Thirteen’s names hadn’t been entered into the system yet, but he knew Bodhi would probably prefer that. (One of his earlier assessments returned: Bodhi was not self-effacing so much as he was fearful of punishment for failure).

His attention was captured by the pilots. However, the officers in the room watched only the center projection, marking the progress of the Death Star as it swung around the far side of Yavin.

_Red Two: Look at the size of that thing!_

_Red Leader: Cut the chatter, Wedge. All wings, accelerate to attack velocity._

His hip radiated ache down his leg. A wave of exhaustion overtook him, and he shifted his weight to the right, adjusting his grip on the cane. His clammy hands slipped on the handle. He wouldn’t sit – it wouldn’t be right, like a final concession, confirmation of his uselessness.

 _Ridiculous_. He wouldn’t have been able to do anything anyway. He wasn’t a fighter pilot. He wasn’t the only combatant relegated to waiting. He wasn’t even the only one consigned to an awkward, frustrating healing process. Not that it would make much difference, if the pilots failed and the Empire brought the epitome of its might down on them.

Jyn groped absently at her neck; only when she caught him looking did she drop her hand. There was no need for explanation. When he first noticed the crystal glittering at her neck during his interrogation, he’d first assumed it was a weapon, or part of one; why else would she take such pains to smuggle it into an Imperial labor camp? The obvious answer came a moment later; it could have sentimental value. On the way to Scarif, he’d seen her twisting the crystal between her fingers, a wordless prayer in the face of uncertainty and fear, ritual formed by many lean years, and known for certain that it was important to her. That she’d deemed Bodhi’s need greater than hers, at least in that impulsive second –

She took his silent regard as enquiring. “It’s … it’s Jedha, you know? Part of it.”  She turned away. “I don’t know.”

But she did, it seemed to Cassian. There was a rough, sharp-elbowed kindness to her sometimes, like she’d never grown comfortable expressing it, or never had the chance to soften it with the knowledge that she wouldn’t be spurned or taken for granted. Tenderness stole his breath, a rush of affection both protective and fierce. Not for the first time, he wished he knew her better.

He was about to speak when she cut him off. “It was probably a bad idea,” she said, shoulders hitching. “A bad reminder. Last time he saw Jedha the Death Star blasted it to atoms.”

She would continue to retreat if he didn’t meet her halfway. “I don’t think so,” he told her. “Home is still home.”   

~

Bodhi swallowed the bitter taste in his mouth. The Death Star swelled in his viewport, a bloated construct slowly blotting out the sight of Yavin’s star.

It wasn’t his first battle; even before he’d defected from the Empire, he survived a bombing on the easternmost landing platform in NiJedha, as the Kybers were being loaded onto his shuttle. The insurgents, probably Saw Gerrera’s Partisans. He remembered feeling a stab of resentment toward them – installation security would be even more stringent now, less forgiving. It would be better for everyone if they just kept their heads down and found a job, like he had. He was wrong, of course. Even thinking it, he’d known it was wrong.

Regardless: the daily smattering of blasterfire in the distance, insurrections when conditions deteriorated enough; Jedha should have accustomed him to the language of warfare, the scrape of adrenaline on his nerves, unbalancing his hands. But at the sight of the superweapon through his viewport, all his training and experience evaporated; he was left with nothing but flickering hope, buried beneath a mountain of cowardly instinct.  

_If you screw up, everyone dies. The Rebellion is extinguished. The Empire crushes the entire galaxy under its heel with the Death Star, pulverizes anything that gets in their way.  Galen’s sacrifice comes to nothing. Jyn and Cassian –_

Cassian’s voice was steady, even as a memory: _You know what you’re doing_ , 

So Bodhi swallowed his fears, and tried to remember everything he’d learned in Assault Tactics and Defensive Maneuvers. An X-Wing was nothing like a TIE – balanced and maneuverable where the latter was optimized toward superior offensive capacity. But they could use this to their advantage.

He fell into place on the end of Red Squadron’s formation, adjusting his ranger for the approach. A bead of icy sweat trickled down the side of his face, caught in his beard.  Fifty-three degrees, a quick blast of his lateral stabilizers. They’d cleared the threshold by a wide margin before the towers sputtered to life, belching green blasterfire at their position.

_Red Leader: All wings, defensive maneuvers! If you see a chance, take a shot at that trench. We might get a clean pass or two before they scramble their fighters._

_Red Two: Copy that, boss._

_Red Five: Copy Red Leader, I’m going in!_

_Red Six: Looks like you know your shit, Thirteen._

Something leapt in his chest, eager and alive.

_Red Thirteen:  Stay on manual as – as long as you can. Their trackers don’t compensate that well for drift._

~

Clustered in the back of the war room, Jyn and Cassian listened in taut, breathless silence.

At first, she couldn’t help but to hope. The Imperials were slow to mobilize; radio chatter was sharp, engaged – not quite jubilant, but it would be if their favorable conditions held.  She almost didn’t recognize Bodhi’s voice; though it retained his nervous cadences, the tone had hardened with purpose. Cassian was right; he knew what he was doing. Better yet, he knew what the Imperials would do, and that alone could turn the tide. She listened with pride bursting in her heart as Bodhi stuttered tactics and guidance over the roar of laser cannonfire.

_Red Five: I’ve got one on my tail!_

_Red Thirteen: I – I got it. I got it!_

Hope made her stupid; it made her forget. For a little while, she didn’t think about the Death Star as an explicit threat with a body count in the billions, a culmination of her father’s enslavement, a symbol of everything the Empire had stolen. It was an obstacle without context; they would destroy it and return to base for evacuation. Everything they’d given, all the years they’d struggled and sacrificed; it wouldn’t be for nothing.

_Red Leader: All wings, this is it. Get right over that port before you drop the payload. And reroute power to front deflectors when you’re in those trenches. Your wingman’ll cover your sides._

_Red Six: Copy, boss. Commencing attack run._

_Red Three: I’ve got you._

Shivering with adrenaline, she glanced at Cassian. Even on tenterhooks, he held himself completely still, his expression smooth and flat. (He had a nice profile, she thought absently, before stuffing the thought down – stupid to think about it now, ridiculous, with the Death Star moments from destroying the moon). Only his eyes flickered with unease. She should have taken it as a sign, forced herself to acknowledge reality sooner.

 _Red Six: Negative, they didn’t go in._ Damn  _it._

The tentative mood died with Red Leader.

~

According to Bodhi’s instructor, spaceflight was a series of shifting priorities in a sensory deprivation chamber; successful pilots could shuffle them on the edge of a second, or faster if they have the Force whispering to them, and the really good ones could do it without guidance. It was a marriage of reflex and logic; perfect as creation when properly aligned, disastrous when not. Bodhi was always an intuitive pilot, and the thick, endless darkness pressing against his viewports no longer disoriented him; at least, they hadn’t on a shuttle run.

But piloting a fighter in the thick of battle was different; not even the sims had prepared him for it. As soon as TIEs swarmed their position, all semblance of cause and effect was lost. His scanner blared its alarm; blasterfire carved through darkness from every direction. The auditory emulator quickly became a distraction; too much was happening, too many engagements, too many defense towers. In the span of three seconds –

_Red Eight: I can’t shake him!_

_Red Leader: Stay on target._

_Red Eight: He’s too close!_

_Red Leader: You’re almost there!_

_Red Thirteen:_ He’s _right there, pull up – pull –!_

– a blossom of red and orange billowed behind him, choked by the vacuum a moment later _._ Voices on the comm – calling for the boss, but crackling silence was the only reply. Dread soured his stomach – the morning’s carboard rations exacting their last revenge. Swallowing bile, he gritted his teeth and brought his ship around, twitching up on the yaw and corkscrewing over a hail of green light.

Their strategic maneuvers broke in the face of the Empire’s superior defenses. It was a loyalty reel playing out in real time; the heroic Empire, the galaxy’s last bastion of law and order, exterminating a hive of terrorists cowering in crumbling ruins on some backwater moon. Perspective was a funny thing. 

He processed time through the deaths of his comrades; first Red Four – his port engine hit by a blast from one of the defense towers – then Red Nine, bullied into the massive hull of the Death Star by a trio of TIE fighters. There hadn’t been enough time to warn them. He wouldn’t have been able to do anything.

_Red Six: Green Squadron’s got them pinned on the equator._

_Red Ten: Copy that. Commencing attack r–_

_Red Three: Sev, behind you!_

_Red Ten: What –?_

Bodhi was nowhere near the trench, but he’d felt it, marrow deep, like an echo in his bones _._ Red Ten and Red Seven’s attack run had failed.

He sucked in a hard breath and steeled his courage. This was no time to fall apart; they may have lost their leader, but they weren’t defeated yet. Galen Erso had trusted him with the knowledge of how to destroy the superweapon, and now its fate rested with him and his comrades. Galen would have been proud, he told himself; he would have smiled, maybe. It might have even reached his eyes.

Bodhi swallowed. He couldn’t let himself think of failure; it would suffocate him if he gave it space to grow.

An X-Wing streaked across his viewport, with a deft TIE in pursuit. Unthinkingly, he swung around and yanked hard on the throttle, and the acceleration threw him back in his seat, left his stomach a few klicks behind.

_Red Six: There’s one on my tail –_

_Red Thirteen: I – hold on. I got him._

_~_

Cassian prepared to die.

After a certain point, it became prudent. Childish wishing only bought disappointment – in this case, a blind, foolish end. He didn’t know when resignation filled the space where his hope had been, leeched of its warmth. He was an observer; he only saw the evidence. Most of Red Squadron had been obliterated in the assault. A black spot on the monitor marked the Death Star’s slow advance, minutes away from firing range. There was no reason to expect the Empire would hesitate. It was an obvious conclusion, acknowledgement of probability.

He had no affairs to settle; only a heartbreak woman and a chorus of ghosts, and they would meet him soon enough. He thought of those he could still remember; Tivik and Hadol and Vleja, ancient Galamar, Nundram with the tremor and the cleft lip. Only Vleja would have understood his reasons. They had an accord, before the end – if their positions were reversed, she would have done the same to him.

A cool, impersonal voice on the comm: _The Death Star will be in range in five minutes_. General Dodonna leaned away from the central projection, eyes clenched shut, as if to distance himself from the circumstances. By the entrance, a few technicians wept, muffling themselves behind their hands. Princess Leia’s countenance remained unchanged, save only for the slightest furrowing of her brows; evidence of focus and determination, not fear.

Jyn’s seared with feral hatred and grief. She trembled, her shoulder brushing his, and his heart lurched to his feet. It probably wasn’t going to hurt, he told himself. They’d be disintegrated before she could feel anything.

He was afraid to look at her, really look at her; ashamed that in these dwindling minutes, more than anything else, he wanted to see her, and be seen. He wouldn’t even mind if she was revolted by that understanding; he only wanted someone to know him as he was, without decades of artifice draped over his features, threading his accent.

“Jyn,” he whispered, because the silence was wasteful. They had so little time, and nothing but each other to fill it. He couldn’t decide if it was a gift or a cruel taunt.

She shook her head, chewing the inside of her cheek. “I’m sorry.”

“What?”

“I – I don’t know what to do,” she admitted, and it all came pouring out. “I want to know what’s happening. Everything, even if it’s bad. I need to be in it. But … I don’t want to know, either. If this is – and we know it’s coming, I don’t want the last thing I do to be sitting around waiting to die. Standing here, with these – fucking statues.”  Her eyes were glassy. “Is that what you imagined for yourself?”

He let out a trembling breath. “I thought it’d happen on a mission.”

“Exactly. I’ve – it’s stupid. How ridiculous is this? I’ve gotten myself out of worse scrapes than this more times than I can count, and I’m positive you have too, and this is how it – ” she trailed off, her voice a bitter hiss. “Trapped. Stomped out like gizka in a barrel. Not even time enough to evacuate the – mechanics and custodians and healers, noncombatants, since they’re right on top of us. It’s _stupid_.”

_Red Two: Del, get out of there!_

_Red Six: He’s got his nose stuck up my ass, I can’t –_

“I can’t listen to this,” she gasped. “And I have to – we have to, what if Bodhi –“ She was spiraling. “I don’t want – I can’t just sit here!”

He couldn’t either; the need to do something with his mind and his hands snagged on his thoughts, yet they had no other choice. _The Death Star will be in range in three minutes._ “So, what do you want?” he heard himself ask.

She blinked, startled; an unfamiliar question. Her answer took a long time to summon, but he saw it coalesce on her features, in the way she looked at him – suddenly desperate, _needful_. “I want to know about you. Something true about you or your life or ... _something_.”

 _Fool – of course she thinks you’re a liar_ , he thought, stifling a wince. _You did lie to her. About the worst possible thing._

What could he have said in place of the lie? That years of cold logic had deserted him the moment he let himself consider the damage he’d do to her, that he was tired of unstraightforward things and dirty hands, closed doors, secrets. That the truth was weakness, and a weapon: _you have your father’s eyes._

He gave her the piece of it he could speak. “I’m glad I met you,” he said.

She stared at him, mouth agape. “W-what?”

 _Don’t make me explain this._ There weren’t enough words to catch it, not enough time to let it breathe _;_ he hardly knew its terrifying dimension, and it lived in him. “I wouldn’t have thought any deeper about what I do for the Alliance if it wasn’t for you. Rather, I wouldn’t have let myself really think about it, or think that there was another way, that there could be, and – and I’m glad that you showed me. Even if I don’t get a chance to put it to use.”

_Two minutes._

She swallowed. “I’m – I’m glad you got me out of the labor camp,” she said and swiped at her black eye with the back of her fist, trying to smile.

“Even though you’d have lived if we hadn’t?”

“You don’t know that. My roommate liked threatening to kill me every night.”

“Hm. She much bigger than you? Faster?”

That aching smile caught an edge, keen enough to draw blood. “Not that much.”

_~_

Pieces of Red Six’s fuselage bounced off the plastiglass viewport of Bodhi’s X-Wing. He kept his eyes fixed to the trench ahead, swallowing bile; he didn’t want to see pieces of Red Six too. There was work to do.

_Red Five: Alright, I’m going to take that trench. Bodhi, Biggs, cover me._

_Red Three: Copy, Luke._

_Red Thirteen: I’m right behind you._

Luke’s ship arced into view, a strangely graceful parabola, before dipping down into the trench a moment later. Bodhi hastened to follow, Biggs on his six.

They had no time. They had to make this run or it would all be over. Their torpedoes had to strike true or the Alliance was finished.

He wondered if he knew any of the Imperial fighter pilots shooting at him, if an old classmate had just killed one of his new allies, if they were about to kill him. Had he been hopeful? It seemed to belong to a different person now; a better pilot, a braver man. They were staring down the barrel of a blaster, a second away from annihilation.

His ranger squealed in alarm as a pair of fighters materialized behind him. His heart pinned itself to his throat.

_Red Five: Biggs!_

_Red Thirteen: I’ll – I got it, I –_

A sleek, cruel fighter shot past. A burst of green light, heat –

~

_The Death Star will be in range in one minute._

She didn’t let herself think about her father, that after all they’d done, after everything they’d lost and everything that had been taken from them, his dread invention was coming to destroy the cause he had hoped to save. He would have been sick to learn about Alderaan; he would have never forgiven himself for the loss of the Alliance. She didn’t know how he would react to the loss of her, at the hands of his life’s work.

She didn’t let herself think about Cassian; the blistering force of his honesty, how badly it had burned. She didn’t let herself consider her own cowardice, the instinct to evade thrumming deep in the shadow behind her heart.

_Red Thirteen: The Force is with me, and I am one with the Force._

_Red Thirteen: The Force is with me, and I am one with the Force._

_Red Thirteen: The Force is with me, and –_

She paled _. “Bodhi!”_

_~_

Spiraling above the blossoming conflagration, blinking past the blaster-pocked smear of detritus that marked where Red Three had met his end. Bodhi pulled hard on the pitch, struggling to stabilize. A high-pitched whine emitted from overclocked instruments, and the X-Wing shuddered like a dying nerf, jangling up his bones, rattling his teeth. He was hyperventilating; great bellows gasps scraping past his throat. So acutely aware was he of his body and how desperately it wanted to keep breathing and beating and _living_ , that his senses reverberated like pain; his thoughts physical and awkward in his skull, each heartbeat an assault. 

Green light burst over the nose of his ship. His hands clenched over the controls, knuckles pale and aching. The truth filtered down slowly, like sand trickling over a towering dune bank to the gorge beneath; he was going to die. Centrifugal force would knock him out soon. He felt it tugging on consciousness, his heart plastered to the back of his ribcage, so he retreated. Death would hurt, failure more so, and he didn’t want to feel it.

More green light; his astromech wailing. He was at the bottom of the dune, now. A second became an age. He lived in the heartbeat of the universe, a subtle pocket of belonging in a scheme larger than he could conceive; his last, before the end. Yet, just as suddenly, he wasn’t alone. In that moment, he _felt_ Luke, the way you feel a shift in the weather, an itch in your gut, settling deep; he felt Luke in his own ship, their mirrored intent like a beam of light cutting across the circumference of the Death Star, through its carapace to the center.

He felt Luke’s desperation and grief, his _hope_. He felt Luke’s call before it came.

_Red Five: Bodhi!_

Jyn’s crystal burned over his heart, searing flesh, blackening bone.

Groaning, howling through gritted teeth; jaw clenched so tight that the ache went down his neck, into his shoulders. He knew it was foolish, that the maneuver would wrench his ship to pieces easy as soggy paan, but it didn’t matter anymore; logical consideration retreated to a distant, mute place. Only duty remained.

He pulled up, his brain flattening against the left side of his skull, breath forced past his raw throat. The X-Wing corkscrewed out of its uncontrolled spin, a whirling dervish, before slicing back into the trench.

Gasping, he leaned on the throttle until the engines whined. He had to reach Luke before the Imperials destroyed him, had to drop the payload now – the Death Star would be in range soon, if it wasn’t already – he could see the lush green of the moon, vulnerable, utterly defenseless – he had to hurry, he had to hurry, he had to hurry –

He fired before he was aware of pulling the trigger or consulting his ranger, before the impulse had crystallized into intent. White-capped flame blossomed at the end of the trench, mirrored a second later on the other side. The cruel, sleek fighter spiraled off into the void.  

_Red Thirteen: I got him. I – I got him!_

_??????: Alright kid, you’re clear! Let’s blow this thing and go home._

Bodhi felt Luke pull the trigger.

_~_

They had been bracing for the end, preparing themselves to face defeat and obliteration with a level gaze and settled heart, as futile as that struggle might have been; as such, they were ill-equipped for victory. At first the remaining pilots’ shouts of triumph had seemed like cries of terror before they were pulverized; the boom on the comm like the primary cannon’s ignition sequence. But the end didn’t come; Cassian went on breathing, hurting, needing.

“Did they …?” Jyn breathed.

He couldn’t answer. A part of him didn’t believe it, couldn’t believe. He had to see the miraculous for it to be real; quantifiable, trustworthy. Mutely, he nodded toward the entrance before setting out, hissing in pain when he put weight on his leg. She pushed away from the console and held out her arm.

“You don’t have to –“ he began

“Shut up.” Her smile wobbled. “Don’t be a martyr.”

So he took it.

They floated through the base, jostled aside as people pushed toward the entrance of the hangar. Shouts crested, wild laughter – someone was crying, hiccupping into his sleeves. A handful of people pointed skyward, their eyes bright with wonder.

He knew Jyn was trying not to push him, and that the gesture was a struggle; she strained against his touch, not to escape him but to urge him forward. He needed no urging. He had to see it for himself.

Yavin’s star had set; night settled over the moon, pink staining the horizon. A halo of debris hung above them, a mechanical supernova; pimpled by bursts of light and flame. He wondered how many officers had been on board; how many dignitaries, strategists, those that just wanted to keep their heads down, earn a paycheck. Alderaan throbbed in his memory like an abscessed sore, but it never sat right to celebrate death – only victory.

Jyn stared up at the sky, chewing savagely on her lip. Her cheeks were splotchy and wet. Instinct overcame him; long buried, a treacherous adversary. Before he could think better of it, he reached across the gap and laced their fingers together. She startled, palm shivering; but he only knew that she didn’t draw away, that her fingers tightened around his, squeezing so hard his bones creaked.

~

Bodhi didn’t remember the flight back to Yavin. Autopilot did the work for him. Bright spots danced beneath his eyelids, and his legs had turned to water. Thoughts were dim, brief pulses of light in encroaching darkness: he wouldn’t be able to stand; he should be hungry; he needed a stiff drink, preferably strong enough to strip the grime from an engine. Maybe someone had a sabacc deck.

He had to remind himself that the Death Star had been destroyed. The magnitude of their victory eluded comprehension. It was impossible; it couldn’t be possible. This was a dream, a cruel facsimile. He was still spiraling above the Death Star, a breath from oblivion.

But reality strained his senses; his body thrumming with ache, a migraine squeezing his temples, his heart stuttering in his throat. Yavin IV increased in his viewport, as if to beckon him home. There were no deserts on Yavin, but there were canyons, and that was good enough for today.

Jyn and Cassian were waiting right where he’d left them. He half expected them to have disappeared in the course of the battle – killed somehow, taken as punishment for his ineptitude and cowardice. But when he steered into the hangar, they stood by his ship’s stall; Cassian leaning on his cane, Jyn rocking back and forth on her heels. She brightened when she caught sight of him through the blast-scored plastiglass.

No words were said. He’d no sooner toppled out of the cockpit before she launched herself at him, crushing him in a fierce embrace. After some urging, increasingly emphatic gestures and wordless appeals, Cassian shuffled over and allowed himself to be captured as well. They were an awkward, twelve-limbed creature, wobbling and giggling and sniffling. And it was a good thing; had he been alone, he wouldn’t have been able to stand.

 


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i give you: bonding. (thanks for reading <3)

Cassian sat in his new quarters on _Home I_ and sifted through a crate brimming with his belongings. It was a sad assortment, somehow even more pathetic collected in one place than it was on shelves and in drawers. He was surprised logistics hadn’t taken one look and sent it off to disposal, more stunned that he hadn’t already done the same himself.

He could feel the engine rumbling through the duraplate floor; a distant, inescapable hum, familiar as a heartbeat. The effect was soporific; if he let his thoughts wander too far, sleep would finally claim him. It seemed like a year had passed in the space of a week; he felt unaccountably old, threaded with ache, stitched together by pain. Too much had happened in so little time.

Ultimately, it had taken the Rebel Alliance only three and a half standard hours to vacate Yavin IV, another four to rendezvous. The evacuation proceeded without a hitch, the way muscle memory overrides disuse. Noncombatants first, shuttled offworld by transports and escorted by a pair of fighters, followed by cargo. After transmitting backups to _Home I_ , operators hit the self-destruct on the servers, destroying any scrap of information a skilled slicer could extract from wiped drives. Each ship was programmed with two sets of coordinates – the first designed to throw off pursuers, the second the real rendezvous point. Speed was prioritized over thoroughness – the Empire would not wait long to send backup to Yavin and finish what the Death Star had begun – yet in the end they left only a few traces of their presence for the next occupants to find.

For the older survivors, that was the mundane business of survival; hammered into habit by years spent looking over their shoulders. Once again, they were wanderers. _That's how it goes._ You had a home one moment, and the next the enemy was at your door with blasters drawn. It was stupid to get attached to a place.

He would miss the jungles, though. The heat.

By now, he was accustomed to life aboard starships. In its infancy, the Rebellion existed as a migrant fleet, chased from system to system by an enemy with eyes in every corner. Intelligence had always been necessary, but in those days it was the bulk of their establishment; they lacked the numbers and organization for military occupations, so they achieved their ends through subtlety and guile. Strange that they’d won a stunning, impossible victory, yet found themselves back where they’d started; weakened, scrambling for resources, desperate to replenish their ranks.

He turned back to the crate, gently sifting through its contents. It was a strange mix of practical equipment and unequivocal garbage; the kinds of things normal people would throw out. But each held a memory he’d promised to keep, as penance. A broken chrono. A haphazard pile of stick drives and spare blaster cells, half of them spent. Bacta wrap, crumpled into a wad of oozing synthweave. A battered copy of _The Octave Stairway_ nestled beneath an irreparable BlasTech DC-17. A few empty kelp snack wrappers, its contents manufactured by a now defunct company that had been a favorite of his father’s.

There was always a few dozen crumpled on the floor of his workshop, like brightly colored birds perched at his feet. No matter how many times his mother chastised him for the mess, his father could never manage the trip to the compactor; it took too much time away from his work. Cassian could still see him as clearly as if he was looking at a holoprint; rooting around some droid’s innards with scratched up hands, (“gloves make you inaccurate,” he liked to say, like it was some great wisdom and not completely ridiculous. “You have to feel it.”) His features were nearly obscured under a layer of grime and sweat, but nothing could hide his manic grin. _C’mere_ , he’d say to Cassian, beckoning him forward. _Say hello_.

His intercom hissed with static. _“Cassian!”_

Flinching, his elbow connected with the crate hard enough to upend it completely, and the contents clattered onto the floor, skidding in every direction. He cursed, struggling to his feet. “Just a second,” he grit out as a jolt of blinding pain shot down his leg.  So far, the painkillers Ula had prescribed him only succeeded in clouding his thoughts.

The door to his quarters whooshed open, revealing Jyn and Bodhi, the former wearing an expression of anxious frustration. She stood on the threshold, near enough that he nearly trod over her, and his heart lurched to his feet. “What are you doing?” he blurted before he could stop himself, wincing; he sounded more reproachful than he intended.

“We were looking for you,” she said, defensive. Bodhi stared at some vague point over Cassian’s shoulder with glassy, unfocused eyes, and she clutched his arm, as if to keep him from floating away. “Why isn’t logistics here handling this?”

“Because I’m here and can do it myself.”

She glanced at the haphazard pile of apparent detritus he’d knocked over. “Looks like you have it under control.”

“You don’t have to be snide.”

“ _You_ don’t have to be so proud.”

He scowled. “I’m not.”

“Ooh, that face. You should see it. Yes, you are.”

The ease with which she isolated his flaws annoyed him, especially after a lifetime of rendering himself inexplicable. There was a smaller frustration nestled beneath; the worry it was all she saw. “Maybe I didn’t want anyone else handling my things.”

“Very convincing.”

“Why aren’t _you_ waiting quietly in the mess for logistics to finish?”

“Because we were looking for you.” Impatient now. “I said that already. And – and it was too loud. Too much going on.” She faced Bodhi, giving his shoulder a little pat. “Right?”

“It was my idea,” Bodhi said automatically.

She turned back to Cassian and fixed him with a pleading gaze, her expression twisted with such fervent appeal that it hit him like a physical blow.

 “Would you help me put them back in the crate?” he said impulsively, shuffling out of the doorway. “I’ll sort them out later.”

“There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” But the words lacked their earlier sarcasm, the teasing, strangely frustrated bite. Giving Bodhi a little nudge, she followed him into the room, closely enough that Cassian could feel the air in her wake brush his face.

He knew he should have sent them to the medbay; Bodhi especially, for what looked like a reaction to the stress of combat. Yet he couldn’t form the words, much less summon the intent. Their presence wasn’t technically against any regulation, especially not while their quarters were still being unpacked and prepared, but still it felt like some crossed line, a forbidden space kept empty for their mutual protection. Not even K had cared that much for Cassian’s human comforts; he treated the size of his quarters as a personal affront, preferring instead to stay with the ship, or report to the droid bay if he was feeling particularly combative.

There was a parade of awkward shuffling as three people negotiated a space designed for one. Bodhi folded himself in the space between the cot and the doorway; as Jyn attempted to step around him, her foot caught on the corner of the wardrobe, and she stumbled, hands shooting out to catch herself against Cassian’s chest. He staggered back, hissing in pain as the two of them crashed against the wall.

“I’m sorry – shit, I’m so sorry –” she managed, and struggled to extricate herself, her cheeks stained crimson. It took him a concussed moment to realize he’d grabbed her waist to steady her, and he released his hold before the sensation could register. But it was too late, he had been too slow to withdraw. Her hands were warm, her waist soft yet somehow solid with muscle won from a hard life, and her eyes – green flecked with light, deep enough to drown in. She was too close, yet not close enough, shorter than she seemed from a distance; enough that he could rest his chin on top of her head if he wanted, if she’d allow it. He wasn’t sure of either.  

“You’re fine,” he said, breathless. “It’s fine.”

Her eyes flickered up to his before darting away. She arranged herself carefully across from Bodhi and dragged the upended crate to her corner, scooping bits and pieces in her arms before dumping them haphazardly inside.  He settled on his cot, back to bulkhead, and willed his throbbing pulse to slow.

“It’s … cozy,” she said, scrubbing at her face, grimacing as her knuckle brushed tender bruise. 

“You don’t have to mince words.”

She chewed her lip against a smile. “My cell on Wobani was bigger. They could stand to give a war hero more space.”

He bristled at the term, then set it aside. It would be petulant to argue the point. “It’s temporary,” he said with a dismissive gesture. “I won’t be here long, I don’t think.”

Her brows twitched, yet she forged ahead, undeterred. “It’s still better than what us grunts get, right?” she said, nudging Bodhi. “We’re going to be in a barracks.”

“Right,” Bodhi echoed.

“How much do you want to bet someone in mine will snore?”

Talk of gambling seemed to revive Bodhi. “Those are bad odds.”

“Ha! How about my bunkmate, what do you think? Can’t be worse than my last.”

“Do you even have any credits right now? I don’t.”

“You can gamble for more than credits,” she said, and shook her head in disappointment. “Favors, for example. Rations. Don’t tell me you never got creative.” It was a little desperate, her bid for conversation, but Cassian was feeling a little desperate himself, to mend a transgression neither could articulate.

“A favor is more valuable than money,” he said.

“See, that’s the idea,” she said with a predatory grin. “Especially if you leave it vague.”

“Too risky.”

“Are you serious? The risk makes it more interesting.”

“I’d only agree to a vague favor as the prize if I was certain I’d win.”

“Then it’s not much of a gamble, is it?”

Bodhi gently placed the BlasTech in the crate, tucking the old bandage around it. “You can’t buy a hit of juma with a favor. I mean, you could, I guess, but it’d be a waste of the favor. They’re kind of a waste, anyway. This guy I knew from the Academy, he spent our whole term going around doing favors for people so he could get a favor in return, and he never cashed in on them. Just kept them to himself.”

“I don’t know, that seems like it could be a benefit,” Jyn said, scooping up stick drives. “They know you have to do something for them but they don’t know what or when. It’s useful, especially if you’re in trouble.” 

“Remind me not to gamble with you, ever.” But Bodhi’s lips twitched, and he pressed them together.

She huffed. “Honestly, you think the worst of me and I’ve done _nothing_ to deserve it. It’s very depressing. I might ask for something completely harmless in this hypothetical scenario, how hasn’t that occurred to either of you?””

Cassian couldn’t help himself. “I wouldn’t count on it.”

With a scowl, she tossed the last of his belongings inside and shoved the crate under his bed. “You’re welcome.”

It didn’t surprise Cassian that she courted risk with feral fascination, circling it like a challenge yet unattempted. His life and vocation had made him more circumspect, always conscious of the many ways a situation could go wrong, wary of what he couldn’t predict, what might compromise his ends. He should be wary of her, especially with the memory of her pressed against him, but that unfamiliar fascination had infected him too.

“Thanks for letting us stay here for a while,” Bodhi said to Cassian, pulling at a thread in the cuff of his jacket.

“Yeah, of course.”

“They’re – it’s –“ Bodhi made a tight, frustrated gesture. “They like us now, and they – they want to talk about it, shaking hands and grabbing shoulders and jostling you around, that kind of thing – and it’s all they want to talk about, what it was like, what J-Jedha was like, what Scarif – now that it turned out alright, they’re happy we’re still alive after the Death Star – but I don’t want to talk about it, I– what’s to say? What could I even say.”

“You don’t have to talk about it,” Jyn said firmly. “You don’t owe them anything.”

“Right,” Bodhi echoed doubtfully.

“I’m serious. You could tell them to piss off. What could they even say to _you_ , after the way they treated you at first?”

Bodhi frowned at her. “You got the worst of it. Nobody was punching me in the face.”

“Yeah, well.”

“You know, you should find that guy!” Bodhi said, revived by the injustice. “That mechanic, or whatever. I wonder what he has to say for himself now.”

“This being the one that hit you,” Cassian said mildly.

Jyn shot him a disgruntled look. “Just leave it. Both of you fuss worse than _Ula_.”

“I’ve barely said anything,” Cassian said, unable to suppress the virtuous note in his tone.

“You’re thinking it. You’re plotting.”

“I really wasn’t.”

This seemed to annoy her, too. “So, tell me more about this other pilot,” Jyn said, scooting closer to Bodhi. “The one from – Tatooine, you said? He looked sad to see you go.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Bodhi muttered, picking at his sleeve.

Too tired to follow the conversation, yet too conscious of their presence to sink completely into sleep, Cassian watched her in a half-daze; her lips as she spoke, her hands moving to the shape of her story, carving it out of thin air. He watched her, not as a distant, clinical observer, but the way one watches a sunset.

But exhaustion settled over Cassian like a sodden blanket, heavy with cold, seeping down to his bones. How long had it been since he slept? It couldn’t have been more than a few days. He had a vague memory of the bacta tank on Yavin IV, how anxious he’d been to move, to get out and do something. Now he felt as if a decade of weariness had been slung around his shoulders. 

Their voices were soporific too, softened by camaraderie; they mingled with the humming of the hyperdrive, however many decks away, thrumming beneath his feet. He closed his eyes for only a moment …

He was jostled back to full consciousness by a rude jolt beneath him. “Look, you missed one,” Jyn said, wiggling out from under the bunk and waving a stick drive in Bodhi’s face. “It was almost lost forever.”

“It’s not like I stepped on it or anything!”

“But what if you never checked, and Cassian had to leave suddenly and throw his things together in a hurry, it’d be left behind and forgotten. Then someone would find it and assume it was garbage and throw it out.”

“Or they’d set it aside for him, for when he came back,” said Bodhi, who seemed to have realized she was teasing.

“You don’t know! These very important files, _lost forever_.” She noticed Cassian and grinned.

“I wouldn’t waste time carting around garbage.”

He’d meant for the words to sound light, but they cast a regretful tone over the following silence. To anyone’s eyes, he was carting around unambiguous garbage, empty snack wrappers and scrapped blasters and at least five spent blaster cells; anyone with a brain would quickly realize what this random assortment meant to him. Before, the lapse in circumspection would have irritated Cassian – leaving himself vulnerable to understanding was a weakness he couldn’t often afford – but he couldn’t muster it today. It didn’t feel like a weakness, for them to know.

Bodhi chewed in the inside of cheek, deliberating, then nodded at the crate. “Is – is he in one of them?”

“What?”

“Kaytoo,” he ventured nervously. “You kept a backup of him, right?”

After a week of pushing down, it was unexpectedly easy to confess, almost eager to be known. “That’s not how it works,” he said, suddenly hoarse. His chest felt heavy. “You can’t separate an entire adaptive consciousness from its primary system and dump on a backup drive. The best you can do are software packages with partial trait subroutines, and those integrate differently depending on the hardware, how old it is, how many times it’s been wiped.”

“I’m sorry,” Bodhi said, horrified. “I didn’t know, I don’t – I don’t know much about droids.”

Rationalizations spilled forth, half-conceived, poorly buried. “It’s always a fluke, the personality,” Cassian said in a rush, as if he hadn’t heard. “It’s different every time, it has to be. You’re piecing together what you can with what you have while the initial programming tries to preserve itself and compensate for the changes you’re making – I mean, do you think the Empire makes it easy to flip their droids? When you’re done there are pieces of that old programming, they’re just turned around; you have to build it from what’s already there, and it affects the final result, you can’t just – like I said, it’s _adaptive_ , especially when you don’t memory wipe, it’s not like replacing a hydrospanner, the hardware – it took me weeks –“ His voice broke. _Say hello_ **.**

“Cassian,” Jyn said, so unbearably gentle.

The anger rushed out of him, left him bare. Guilt quickly took its place. Bodhi hadn’t meant any harm, probably even thought it would encourage him. But the question had only reminded Cassian of a quiet betrayal – that if it had been possible, he didn’t know that he wouldn’t try to bring his friend back. It wouldn’t have been K, but it would have been a comfort.

K had always found his moralizing pathetic.

“I’m sorry,” he said, rubbing his face with a shaking hand. _I miss him_ , he wanted to say, but the words stuck in his throat. “I’m sorry. It’s a fair question.” He dug deep, dragged the truth squirming into the light. “I’ve been … trying not to think about it.”

He couldn’t bring himself to go on. The silence lengthened; Jyn chewed on the edge of her tongue, some internal struggle warping her expression, before she let out a hard breath. She wrapped her arms around herself, shivering. “When I was with Saw, we – whenever someone died we wouldn’t think about it that much. You couldn’t, because you were fighting every day, or preparing to fight; you never knew when the Empire would show up, you had to keep your eyes open or you’d be next. You know what it’s like. We didn’t have a dedicated service or anything, just one night where we sat around and drank as much as we could spare. Someone would find a little stone and we’d pass it around, and when it was our turn to hold it we told a story about them, only one – our favorite. You had to, even if you didn’t like them. You could tell a story about a time they really pissed you off, but you had to tell one. And then when everyone had finished, we buried it. Especially because most of the time we didn’t have a body – couldn’t get back into the combat to drag them out, couldn’t spare the manpower or the time.

“Saw thought more than that was wallowing in something we couldn’t change. I used to think the whole thing was ridiculous. It just made me angry, I don’t know why. I didn’t want to think about them at all, especially after they– after I was on my own. But I think it makes sense now. The stone makes it final, makes it like – like putting something up in your memory, too; where you can always come back to it. And I think – I think you should come back, every now and then.” Her own voice had grown hearty. “So you pick the best one for their place.

“I’m not saying you have to tell us!” she clarified defensively. “Maybe just put up his stone in your head. You don’t have to think about all of it, just your favorite thing.

He couldn’t speak for a long time, couldn’t force the words past the tightness in his throat. It was almost the same ritual he’d done for years, the same gravestones in his crate, yet he’d never looked at it like that before, somehow. He had to give K his due, and someone had to hear it. “I don’t have any alcohol,” he managed finally.

Bodhi blinked, hesitating, before he rifled through the pockets of his overlarge jacket and produced a battered canteen. “I, uh … I do.”

Jyn stared at him, agog. _“How?”_

“Oh, one of the pilots – he had some grog they brewed in a ‘fresher. In the bath, obviously,” he clarified at Jyn’s horrified expression. “It was right after we docked. I was – you know. It’s completely disgusting, but it does the job.” He offered the canteen to Cassian with an awkward grimace that was probably supposed to be a smile. “You’re not going to bust me, right?”

Cassian managed one of his own. “Not over this.”

He flipped the lid off the canteen and took a heavy swallow, barely wincing as the alcohol burned down his throat, liquid flame warming his belly. He was well accustomed to the vintage. 

“I can’t choose a favorite,” he said finally. “I think it would change depending on the day.”

“What’s your favorite today?” Jyn prompted.

He thought about it. “It has a long setup.”

“Naturally.”

Her eagerness encouraged him. “I was brought into the Alliance officially when I was fourteen. I lied about my age so they’d take me seriously, but I don’t think Draven was fooled. One of the first assignments I got after my training was intercepting Kay, sort of. I was technically supposed to destroy him.”

“Destroy?!”

He gave a half-shrug, nearly sheepish. “He was initially designated to run security and analysis for an Imperial research and development instillation; not weapons, mostly infrastructure. But the technician he was assigned to, they’d stumbled onto an Alliance supply cache, and were racing back to Imperial space with some sensitive schematics they’d found, too large to transfer. Obviously, these couldn’t be disseminated, so I was sent to terminate them both.

“I was – well, I was still new at wetwork. They were desperate, though, and I had to make do. I found them in a cantina on Rishi; his ship had been stolen and he was trying to find another way off – not doing a very good job, either. Making a scene. I confronted him after they left for the alley network. It … didn’t go smoothly. Kay was equipped for combat, you remember. I had to drop both of them.”

“Well, you were only fourteen,” Bodhi said fairly, eyes wide.

“That’s what the technician said. ‘You’re just a sprog!’ he kept saying – indignant at first, before I disabled Kay with an ion bolt and got the muzzle of my blaster under his chin.” He pushed the details away: the man’s acrid breath, reeking of onions and cheese; his eyes pitted wide, iris swallowed by pupil; how terrified he had been to die. “After, I was supposed to fry Kay’s drive and get the hell out of there, but – I don’t know. I couldn’t. It was wasteful, and it wasn’t like he had any say in what he was doing – the Empire doesn’t allow free will in their droids. Only loyalty. And I guess I felt –“ He let out a breath, his smile self-deprecating. “I felt sorry for him.”

Jyn blinked hard. “You really flipped Kay when you were fourteen?”

“It was that or destroy a potential resource. That’s how I sold it, anyway. I convinced Draven, and he convinced the Council. He wasn’t a general then, he used to be my handler, so he didn’t have as much pull as he does now, but he knew how to sell it too. It took me weeks, and when I finally activated him again, as soon as his photoreceptors blinked on, he said ‘It’s the sprog!’”

Jyn snorted, covering her mouth with her hand.

“It scared the hell out of me. There was no way he should have been able to remember that, not after the job I’d done. I had to scrub nearly the entire system to overwrite the loyalty protocols. And the thing is … he never sounded indignant when he said it, either. He wasn’t replaying that last memory before I disabled him. He just thought it was funny. He wouldn’t stop calling me sprog for years, especially when I annoyed him.”

“Why did he stop, do you think?” Bodhi wondered.

“Maybe he didn’t think it was funny anymore,” Jyn said carefully, with a nervous look at Cassian.

He knew that was true; he even remembered what had changed. “That’s what I mean,” he said after he’d composed himself. “It wasn’t that funny, or interesting – just something he liked. Those quirks that aren’t even supposed to be there; you can’t remove them or copy them, or reproduce them in another system. It was just him.”  

They sat in silence for a long time, but the quiet was different than before, when he’d been alone with his box of memories. The truth was easier to bear now; not without its jags and edges, but softer all the same. K would have liked to be remembered in such a way, at least privately. He might have even revived the old nickname, just to be an asshole. Cassian missed him more than he could put into words. “To Kay,” he said, and drank deep.

“I only have one story,” Jyn said after he passed her the canteen. “I mean, one you wouldn’t know about. Unless he told you.” She gave him tentative smile. “I’d’ve made it off Wobani if not for him.”

“I do know,” Cassian said. “After looking at your file, I wasn’t going to risk underestimating you.”

“That was smart. Disappointing, though, that you have that little faith in your infiltration team.”

“To be fair, you did take them by surprise.”

 She smiled mysteriously, and took another hearty swig. “To Kay.”

“We should do for Baze and Chirrut too,” Bodhi said after Jyn passed him the canteen, flicking the lid with nervous fingers. “Someone should.”

 “I don’t have a story about him, but I have a story he told,” Jyn ventured. “They both did, sort of. You can probably imagine. Chirrut did the actual storytelling, Baze made editorials.”

“Don’t keep us in suspense,” Cassian urged.

This time she didn’t try to swallow her smile, and it took him by the heart. “Now look, I can’t tell it like he did. He had that – you know, the tone of voice. It sounded real, when he was saying it.”

“Go on!”

“I’m getting there! How are _you_ so impatient? Isn’t it your job to be patient, like when you’re staking out a mark? I’m pretty sure.”

“I’m not staking out a mark right now.”

“ _Clearly_. I’m just trying to remember how he started it.” She took a breath, let the silence settle. “There is a place on Jedha only the worthiest of sentients have seen; a cave that wanders.”

“Oh, I know this one!” Bodhi exclaimed, nearly knocking over the canteen. “The thief and the thimble.”

“Do you want to tell it?

“No, no – I’m no good. My aunt was the one who told it.”

“You’d probably still do it more justice than I would.”

He flapped his hands at her. “You do it.”

“Right, so … I have to paraphrase now, I can’t remember the way he told it. There were obviously endless riches in this cave, because that’s how these stories go. Enough to settle the next ten generations of your line, or whatever. So for centuries upon centuries, people would set out on these desperate expeditions to find this cave and take the treasure for themselves –“

“You forgot the saying,” Bodhi interrupted. “An endless mass of riches, yet small enough to fit inside a thimble.”

“Right, so everyone assumed it was some gem.”

“Not just any gem!” Bodhi insisted. “And they didn’t assume. It was the heartstone. That’s what the thimble means.”

“It was probably just a regular old Kyber,” Jyn said as an aside to Cassian. “That’s what Baze said. Then Chirrut cut him off: It could cure any illness, answer any question – you’d feel it without knowing.  ‘It doesn’t exist,’ Baze insisted. And then Chirrut said he couldn’t possibly know that for certain. Then Baze said it was still pretty damn unlikely, no matter what Chirrut said. Anyway, people tried for years and nobody ever found it. At first they’d find a cave right where it was supposed to be, but it was always empty – that’s why they started saying it wandered, since it couldn’t be that cave, that cave was supposed to have the heartstone.  

“You have to tell him about the thief,” Bodhi said. “It doesn’t make sense otherwise.”

Jyn kicked peevishly at his feet. “How about you tell him, since you have such a discerning opinion.”

Bodhi carried on with great dignity, his voice dropping to the appropriate hush. “The thief lived in the Holy City, hassling the guard. She didn’t care about the treasure; she never cared about the things she stole, just the act of stealing itself. She’d give away whatever she took, not to be kind but because it didn’t interest her. There was nothing she couldn’t steal when she set her mind to it. She heard about the wandering cave and the heartstone and decided she’d take a shot at it. It would be the greatest challenge of her life, an ultimate test of skill.

“Everyone laughed at her – her friends, anyway. Not the guard, they’d just try to arrest her. You know. Anyway, they all thought it was a big joke, and the ones who didn’t were offended –  they spent their lives preparing themselves to search for the cave and the heartstone, so they could be pure of spirit. And she cheated and stole and didn’t tithe to the gods or confess her sins or make pilgrimage or do any of the things she was supposed to, and thought she could just swoop in and steal it.”

“Baze said that’s what everyone else was doing, all those nobles and holy men too, except they were trying to dress it up in righteousness,” Jyn said, leaning back against the bulkhead, legs stretched out. “She didn’t want the reward, she wanted the challenge. It’s not perfect, Chirrut said, but it’s better than greed, more honest than selfishness dressed up like piety. She was only ever honest.” 

Bodhi continued: “That’s why she found the cave almost immediately. She turned right around and went back to the city, sorely disappointed. ‘No heartstone’ she said, sighing. ‘Just a cave full of credits.’ She hadn’t taken a single piece. The search had been so easy there was no satisfaction in it for her. And when everyone raced out to the cave it was empty. That’s what the legends meant about wandering – it was a different place to whoever found it. So, that’s the story. She left Jedha in search of the heartstone, the one thing she could never find, and no one ever saw her again.”  

Jyn smirked, though it was tinged with a distant melancholy. “You think Chirrut was making some subtle comment on my profession?”

Cassian couldn’t help himself. “Maybe it was about your character.”

She shook her head and made a face. “I stole things I wanted. Especially when I was on my own.” She didn’t say the rest, but she didn’t have to. “Anyway.” She plucked the canteen out of Bodhi’s hands and took a hearty swig, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “To Baze and Chirrut.”

“The only nice thing about them dying,” said Bodhi after a while, “is that they died together. They didn’t have to – to figure out how to go on without each other. I think if you care about someone long enough, you forget how. And they’d known each other almost their whole lives.”  

Jyn shivered, her shoulder brushing the edge of his cot, and groped for the canteen again. He felt the same; it was like walking over a grave – yet somehow also captivating, fascinating, a lovely threat you can’t bring yourself to fear.

Sniffing, she forged on, turning to Cassian. “What was the best thing you ever stole?”

“Technically, Kay.”

“That’s right, pretty much everything you’ve done for the Alliance was stealing from the Empire, in some way,” she agreed. “Mine was a meal.”

“Are you serious?”

She closed her eyes dreamily. “I hadn’t eaten more than scraps in weeks. Stuff you dig out of the compactor, you know? It’d been a bad run. Some fancy place was hosting the governor and his retinue, and they’d prepared a huge feast. I stole as much as I could, I was stuffing whatever I could get my hands on in my coat. It was – _perfect_. I don’t even know what it was, just that it was perfect. Rich and savory, the meat so tender it practically dissolved in my mouth. I had to space it out so I wouldn’t puke it all up, and it was so good I almost couldn’t manage. I would have inhaled the whole thing without even thinking about it.” She turned to Bodhi. “Your turn.”

He stared at her with bleak dismay. “I can’t tell you after that story, come on. You guys are sad. You’ve had sad lives. Mine is stupid.”

“Don’t be a shit,” she shot back. “Out with it.”  

“I -- I didn’t steal it, exactly. I won it in a bet.” Bodhi shook his head, almost disgusted with himself. “I had a sabacc deck,” he said wistfully. “My lucky deck. I made so many credits with that deck, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Not even a trick deck or anything.”

“I was pretty sure the Empire had regulations against gambling,” Cassian said.

Bodhi gave him a nervous smile. “They do. When they caught wind of it they cut off our discretionary funds, since that’s part of your service contract – minor offenses forfeit your pay, but you still have to serve. So we started being more careful; schedules, codes. It felt – it felt good doing something wrong under their noses. You know? Like they don’t know everything, they can’t control everything.”

Jyn beamed. “I like you even more now.”

He waved this off. “I didn’t think to bring it when – when I defected, I wasn’t thinking about anything else while I was doing it, right? I thought a loyalty officer would show up behind me and send me to Reorientation or blast me to atoms or something, even just thinking about defecting, so I was – I was in a hurry.” He fell silent, shuddering. “Maybe everything would have happened differently if I had my deck.”

“Well,” Jyn said, nudging his feet again, yet somehow the gesture was encouraging. “It could have been a lot worse.”

He watched as Jyn and Bodhi spoke, leaning together like conspirators, sniping like siblings. Belonging enveloped him, warmth on a frozen planet, light in darkness. They were the only other two people in the galaxy who knew exactly what it felt like, who understood completely, without need for words. And, somehow, they were the only other two people in the galaxy that he could talk to without folding himself into a better shape, who accepted him as he was.

He drifted to the sound of their voices, floating above the hum of the hyperdrive.  

 

 


	10. Chapter 10

 

The ceremony was held in _Home I’s_ council chamber; a vast, tiered room that comprised two decks in the aft compartment and smelled perpetually of ozone and cleaning solvent. Small groups of officers and soldiers alike clustered throughout, speaking in genial tones they hadn't used for months, before migrating to their seats. A beleaguered Twi'lek gestured sharply and barked orders to his horde of scurrying assistants, his purple eyes narrowed into slits. Holocams wreathed the platform, ready to transmit the footage to all Alliance channels; hope in a holoprint.

The air was subtly charged with relief and an unfamiliar anticipation, tenative as spring.

It made Jyn's palms itch.

She sat in the back of the chamber with Bodhi, picking at her ragged fingernails.  Bodhi fared no better; he bounced his leg at a frenetic pace, and it set her nerves on edge almost as much as the furtive looks they received every few moments, behind hands and over shoulders.

"Rubbernecks," Jyn muttered irritably.

"At least they don't look angry anymore," Bodhi said apprehensively.

"No, now they're trying to be subtle," Jyn fired back, which was, in her opinion, far worse. Good or bad, she prefered the forthright over the alternative. She shoved the following thought of Cassian aside, rough-elbowed, as if it had personally wronged her. Betrayed by her own brain.

Over the last four days, she had spent her free time attempting to catalog _Home I's_ exits, but there were too many to count, let alone remember; the ship was a staggering one-thousand two-hundred meters long, outfitted to support a crew of six thousand, with twenty massive hangars to accommodate the Alliance's few remaining warships and snub fighters. Worse than the overabundance of a good thing was the knowledge that in the event of an emergency it wouldn't do her any good; she was familiar with escape-pod protocols, and had quickly memorized their positions in her sector, but she could never shake the unease that accompanied such a flight -- the sense of the void pressing against portholes, solid ground so distant as to be irrelevant.

She closed her eyes, pushing the discomfort aside. She was an adult, not a whimpering child, and she'd lived on ships before. It just took a bit of adjustment.

"How long do you think this will take?" Bodhi asked her.

"Too long," she groused. "This is a waste of time."

"Maybe a little." He allowed, and managed a tentative smile, probably for her sake. "They deserve some recognition, at least."

 _They_ being the official heroes, the farm boy and his smuggler cohort. "You deserve it too," Jyn insisted. The injustice infuriated her; Command's inability to acknowledge everyone responsible rendered the entire gesture farcical, robbed it of its earnestness. "You did more than anyone. None of this would have happened if not for you." None of this would have happened if not for her father, too; if he hadn't reached out to a stranger and trusted him with the fate of the Rebellion. The thought made Jyn angry, and sad, and a little proud, somehow.

Bodhi was shaking his head, waving her away. "That was all Galen."

She was really starting to get irritated with his constant self-deprecation. "Did my father fly us through the Scarif shield-gate and get us out of there when we were finished? Did he fight in the battle over Yavin and take the shot that destroyed the Death Star?"

"Luke did that."

"Who was covering him? Seems to me like he'd've had his ass shot off if you weren't there."

Bodhi shot her an irritable look. "It was --" He turned away, cursing under his breath in a language she didn't know. "All of it was a little more complicated than that."

She pinched his arm. "I could probably keep up."

They were interrupted by the sound of shoes scuffing, followed by the sudden materialization of Cassian behind them. He looked wan, she noticed with a frown. Despite spending three solid days in the medbay absorbing bacta transfusions and suffering Ula's unending fussiness, he seemed more careworn than she'd ever seen him, crushed beneath some unseen weight. "Could I join you?" He asked. She noticed his cane was gone.

His formality annoyed her, but a part of her understood it as well; she could barely look at him without remembering their brief collision, his hands on her waist, his face far, far too close. That annoyed her too. It hadn't meant anything, hadn't felt like anything; it was a fluke and nothing more. "Do as you like," she said, colder than she intended.

Cassian's expression betrayed nothing. She realized an instant later how sad the sentiment would be to him; not a rejection, but a reminder that he had so little chance to do as he liked in the course of his fraught life. _I've been fighting for the Rebellion since I was six years old._ "Maybe you can knock some sense into his head," she added as a peace offering, gesturing to Bodhi with a jerk of her chin.

"What has he done now?" Cassian said, lowering himself carefully in the seat beside her.

Bodhi rolled his eyes. "I haven't done anything. She's upset because I refuse to exaggerate my involvement in this." He made a vague gesture at the proceedings; now, the Twi'lek was lecturing an unfortunate assistant, his head-tails twitching with ire.

"I'm not upset," she said, kicking at his feet. "He means that he denies any involvement outright."

Bodhi crossed his arms and turned away, a muscle in his jaw flickering. "It doesn't really matter, in the end. Any of what we did."

A chill seemed to descend over them, and Jyn shivered. "You can't mean that."

"It doesn't matter," Bodhi repeated, unbearably distant. "It's all well and good for them to get some recognition, they deserve it; they're the ones -- they fired the shot, okay? But it won't matter in the end; it doesn't matter what we do, the Empire -- I mean, they're dug in. They're everywhere. Even blowing up the Death Star isn't going to stop them, it was like one really big gun in a closet of billions. They'll always have more."

"They're not going to have a few dozen Death Stars in the works," Cassian said calmly. "One they could hide effectively, but more? Where would they find the supplies to build such a weapon again? Assuming they do have the supplies, they no longer have Galen or the plans. They would have to start from scratch. And it took them almost two decades to build the first one."

"It's not about Death Stars. It's just -- them. Every link in the chain, every tier of command -- its ubiquitous. It's everywhere; they even get their claws in the Outer Rim. How do you think they get so many slaves for labor?"

"Even the Empire's resources are finite," Cassian said stubbornly.

"Bodhi, c'mon," Jyn chided with a smile. "You can't let yourself think like that. Take it from me, okay; I'm practically a professional. You think about it too much, it drags you down, crushes you. And the longer you leave it like that, the heavier it gets, until you can't move it anymore. And you're stuck with it for good. So -- look, we're alive, and we can fight. And for once we have the drop on them. You think they're going to be all Imperial Efficiency after you sunk the pride of their fleet? They're probably scrambling. So -- so knock it off." She gave him a gentle punch on the shoulder, rocking him slightly.

Bodhi stared at his upturned hands. "I'm sorry."

"Everyone feels hopeless sometimes," Cassian said fairly.

"And now you have people who'll rattle some sense into you," Jyn teased. "We run a cutting edge service here."

An odd feeling; too late did she recognize that dreaded _we_ had crept into her speech, the implied sense of lasting partnership, one they barely understood.

Finally, a grin tugged at Bodhi's lips, though it was still tinged by that distant look in his eyes.  "Look, they're starting."

A hush swept through the room. The Twi'lek master of ceremonies gestured to his horde of assistants, counting down on his fingers. Three, two ... and the holocams flashed on, capturing Mon Mothma as she ascended to the stage, her white robes flowing with each step. Her auburn hair glinted in the strange light of the room, burnished fire and gold.

"I can't hear her," Bodhi whispered.

Jyn nearly choked on a bark of laughter. "They forgot to set up speakers back here." It was appropriate, somehow. 

On the platform stood Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, the latter flanked by his Wookie companion, suitably heroic in their Corellian bloodstripes.  Princess Leia positioned herself behind them, poised as a warrior queen, yet immaculate in white. Their smiles were fixed yet unforced; utterly genuine. They looked like figments of myth, a holodrama given flesh and form. 

And in the back of the chamber, Jyn swiped at her blackened eye and glowered at the proceedings, that familiar irritation tangling her thoughts to knots again. Bodhi chewed the inside of his cheek, and Cassian watched with a flat mask of calm, betraying nothing. She had spent too much time around him, studying him, drinking in the solidity of his presence; now that mask posed a challenge. She would crack it if she could, and find the truth within.

~

The parties were hosted in the seven cantinas on _Home I;_ in official capacity, they were used as mess halls and storage closets, but Command had approved their return to function for the next three standard days following the ceremony. Those were the perks of hosting the heart of the Rebellion on what was meant to be a civilian cruiser. In happier times, maybe. Cassian couldn't imagine them.

He leaned against the bartop and observed the proceedings. He was always removing himself from the thick of things to find a better vantage point, a corner or high point from which to study comrades and enemies alike. You saw more from above. There was no perspective in the thick of things.

Dull, thudding music permeated the air, and the smell of cooking meat and alcohol filled the room, thick enough that it seeped out into the hall. He watched a group of pilots laughing and jeering, playing a drinking game involving a buzz droid and a blaster cell. He watched a cluster of dignitaries sipping impossibly rare Corellian wine; their portentousness cloying as humid heat. He watched Bodhi and Luke Skywalker sitting at a small table in the back of the room, the latter telling a story complete with sweeping, animated gestures to Bodhi's rapt attention. He watched Draven approach, studied his hard-featured exhaustion and stiff shoulders, focus stitched between his brows. Cassian wouldn't be surprised if he hadn't slept a full night in weeks.

"Captain Andor."

"General."

Draven waved the bartender over and ordered a Chandrilan brandy; a famously difficult vintage, and deeply appropriate. "It's an acquired taste," he said in response to Cassian's arched brow.

 _As is a certain senator._ Cassian said nothing, only smiled.

"I'm surprised to see you here," Draven said, accepting the drink from the bartender, a Sullustan with one milky eye.

"I was coerced," Cassian said with a shrug. "Apparently I need to relax."

"You could stand to enjoy yourself on leave every once in awhile," Draven agreed.

"I hardly think you're the one to lecture me on this."

"Fair point." He took another sip, this time wincing as it went down.  "Anyway, that's not what I came here to talk to you about."

"What's the problem?"

“No problems today, just something you'll find amusing. Officially, you’re dead.” A wry smile. “Condolences."

 So this was his strategy; Cassian had wondered how Draven would handle the fallout of their mission. "Was this even a debate?”

“You’d be surprised. The Council is scrambling. They want to play Scarif like they reached a final consensus privately, otherwise it makes them look like fools, like their leadership is weak.” His lips twisted. “And we can’t have that. So they thought to adorn you with accolades, arrange you up on that platform with the rest of them and broadcast your guilty faces far and wide. But I won't let them compromise the identities of my operatives for the sake of their pride.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. "It was not a brief conversation."

Gratitude nearly overwhelmed Cassian. “Thank you, sir."

Draven waved this aside, leaning back against the bar and crossing his arms. Sentiment often annoyed him. “Scarif presented us with a unique opportunity,” he mused. “One that we'll have to treat carefully.  The Empire is going to start asking questions if they haven't already, so we've let some 'sensitive' information leak." Draven thumped the heel of his hand on the bartop. "Encrypted just enough to make them think we were trying to hide it. Among them is an obituary, detailing the brave sacrifice of all the Scarif infiltrators; none of whom survived."

"Do you think they'll buy that?"

"They'll probably assume we're lying -- I would. But there's no trail to follow, nor would you provide them one with careless conduct." His voice dropped to a fervent hush. “I want them uninformed; I want the mystery to unbalance them. I want you to be boogeymen. Did some of the infiltrators escape with the rest of our forces? They’ll wonder, they might make dangerous assumptions. We want them to waste time and resources with an investigation, confirm our 'leaked' intel and ultimately dismiss you to pursue other leads.”

Cassian nodded. “They’d have at least considered Bodhi Rook’s involvement, his defection with Galen Erso’s message, the plans and knowledge of Imperial codes and procedures, but as long as they conclude he died on Scarif, they won’t expect him to supply us further, or facilitate more operations."

"It’s even more essential the Empire believe Jyn Erso is dead," Draven added, his eyes unreadable. "If the Empire learned that she was still alive and partly responsible, that it was Erso's daughter who destroyed them and not a random criminal, do you think they’ll let her disappear? How much of what Galen knew does she know? Maybe she knows where to find more of his research. They won’t assume that she’s useless or ignorant, so they’ll break her to get whatever they can.”

Cassian's expression was a mask of icy calm, though cold fury took him by the throat. “We need that advantage.”

“Exactly.”

“So what do we know about the scapegoats?”

Hard satisfaction glinted in Draven’s eyes, at a plan well-conceived. “They're nobodies,” he said. “A smuggler and a farm boy from some Outer Rim backwater. Their previous connection to the Alliance went as far as their involvement in the recent battle. They don’t know anything aside from rumor, so they can’t expose any sensitive information.”

“I was under the impression they’d decided to join the Alliance.”

“They have.”

Cassian processed this in an instant. “You don’t care that the Empire will learn their identities. You would sacrifice them for the sake of ours?”

“Of course I would. I don’t know Han Solo or Luke Skywalker. I don’t know their abilities and I don’t trust them.”

“Not even after what they’ve done?”

“Their moral characters aren’t the issue. I don’t trust their intelligence. But they’re skilled enough pilots, and we can make use of that without exposing them to any information that would weaken us if it was compromised. We play it up their involvement for morale, give our heroic victory as much weight as possible. ‘The Empire brought to its knees by a couple of grunts.’ It’s inspiring, it gives people hope, and hopeful soldiers fight harder. In the event our brave heroes are killed by the Empire, with the proper handling they become martyrs and galvanize our forces to avenge them and win the fight in their name. Either way, it works in our favor.” He leaned forward, intent. “You’re more valuable, and more dangerous. You could destroy the Rebellion if the Empire discovered what you know.”

The suicide pill seemed to throb against his chest, a second, terrible heart. “I would die first.” It was the truth, it had always been the truth – he was prepared to do what was necessary to protect the Rebellion and its people – but now the words lingered like an accusation, echoing in his skull. _Liar_.  

Draven shook his head, almost as if he heard. “You could save the Rebellion with what you learn. You have before.”

Cassian’s reel of frenzied speculation stalled, shattered; General Davtis Draven was not in the habit of flattering anyone, especially not his operatives. “Sir?”

Draven pushed away from the bar, thumping his hand atop it one last time.“That’s all, Captain Andor. I'll leave you to your celebrations.”

"Such as they are."

Possibilities arrayed themselves in his thoughts as he watched Draven leave; a concession? Recognition, perhaps. He was not dealing with the Draven he had known for over a decade, a man as implacable as the frozen world Cassian had come from. He had nearly drained his drink when the answer came to him; his superior’s speculation lacked its customary distance. In the space of a week, it had once again become personal.

His head hurt. Thoughts fuzzed at the edges, diffuse and awkward. Practical concerns aside, he understood that learning the last hope of freedom for the galaxy had lain in the hands of a criminal, a defector, and a spy wouldn’t lift the anyone’s spirits. It seemed more like the setup for a bad joke. Yet it was wrong that the man who had informed them of the Death Star’s existence before taking active part in its destruction wouldn’t get any true credit for what he had done, or that the woman responsible for delivering the plans to the Alliance would be banished to the front, casually shunted aside as if nothing had happened.

It was the nature of service. But that didn't mean he had to like it.

He didn't see Jyn until she'd nearly materialized on his feet, and her sudden presence knocked the breath out of him. The rest of the cantina blurred, like fog dispersing under the steady gaze of the sun; she was a solid point in a world of shifting grey, the dulled music like a heartbeat. They were surrounded, and alone.

"Cassian," she said coolly.

Foreboding soured his stomach. "Hey, Jyn."

She let him stew until finally a sly grin curved her lips. "So ... I'm an advantage, huh?"

Dismay nearly choked him. "You heard us?"

"You mean you didn't notice me?"

He had somehow noticed everything in the room but Jyn. Awe mingled with irritation; he was supposed to be better at this -- a professional, each experience hard-won - but he couldn't deny that she impressed him.  If she could evade his active observation, she'd be more than an asset on the field. The thought was dangerous, and intoxicating ... "I was preoccupied."

"Mhm. Of course. If you'd rather I leave you to your preoccupation --"

"I'd rather be distracted from it, honestly."

"I'm game." Her grin lost its cunning edge, left an expression sweet as summer. "So, you do that with everyone. Even your boss! I'm impressed."

"What."

"Your leading questions thing."

It was his turn to smile. "Who do you think I learned it from?"

"Oh, I don't know. I thought it might be a character defect."

"Are you always so charming?"

"Only when the mood strikes."

He turned away before she could see the truth of his reaction bloom over his features; heat, the stirrings of surrender, a temptation to be fiercely guarded against. Lately, it had become more difficult to hide himself from her understanding; her cutting gaze, sifting past his layers with single-minded determination for what lay beneath. It was the challenge she was attracted to, he coached himself. She struck him as that type. But those green eyes burned, they seared him to the bone and beneath, and he couldn't hide.

"You sound like a different person when you're talking to him," she said, tracing circles in the condensation on the bar. "Do you like looking at things like that?"

"Like what."

"Like ... everything is detatched from you, and you're watching it all from above, trying to move the pieces around, and figuring out how they'll be moved when you're not looking."

Her understanding rocked him to the core; it was all he could do to cobble together a cogent reply. "It's prudent. It's the difference between life and death."

"That's not what I asked. I asked if _you_ like it."

"I -- I don't know," he admitted. "I've been thinking like this for so long, it's not a matter of liking, it just is. For everything."

"So I'm a piece too?"

"Everyone is."

He waited for the sullen disappointment, but she surprised him with another grin. "What kind of piece."

He didn't even have to think about it. "The Molator."

"Seriously! Am I ugly or something?"

"Don't be ridiculous. It's the most offensive piece on the board."

"Is that really what you think of me?"

"Some of it, anyway." He tapped his chin in thought. "Maybe the Monnok. You reminded me of a monnok with your truncheons."

"Now I'm really offended." 

"You're trying to be offended. Those are the best dejarik pieces."

"Are you drunk? The Strider is best, obviously. Because what happens when someone's got their Molator on the move? You crush it with the most defensive piece in the game. Obviously."

"Unless it crushes you first. The Molator's attack is stronger than the Strider's defense."

"Well, you have to be smart about it. I assume you're capable."

His brows lifted. "Is that a challenge?"

"Sure, why not. I'd enjoy humbling you."

"That's funny," he said, turning to face her, failing to suppress a grin. "I was just thinking the same thing."

He couldn't be certain, not in the low light, reds and purples and blues drifting from face to face, muted by the mood, but her cheeks had grown flushed. He felt it, too; a strange shimmering heat, feverish in the thrumming room. Each nerve was alight, and he was painfully aware of the space she occupied beside him, close enough to feel the heat of her skin, to realize how much he needed, how badly --

She cleared her throat. "Now, I'll warn you. My father taught me to play this game. You know, the genius?"

"Did you ever beat him?"

Her eyes danced. "A few times. And before you say anything, no, he didn't let me win. For him, it was more about learning through your errors. Dejarik's really good for it, because you know the rules and the board is always the same, so you can trace your steps back and see what went wrong, where you made a bad call. Then you don't make it again." 

"It's easier said than done."

"Sure. But it's good practice, at least." She faced him again, tilting her head inquisitively. "Who taught you to play?"

To his shame, he considered lying -- only for a fraction of a second, but just long enough for the errant thought to be a betrayal. That she wouldn't like the answer was no excuse. "Draven, actually."

She turned back to the bartop, tracing circles again. He noticed her fingers trembled. "I didn't get the impression he cared for games."

"You said it yourself, it's a useful game. Abstract extrapolation, strategy; handy skills for an operative."

"Detachment. They're just pieces, after all."

He heard the accusation, and its cause. "Jyn ..."

"Don't make excuses for him."

"It wasn't going to be an excuse. Just ... an example."

After a hard silence, she gestured in defeated allowance.

"You don't like him, and that's fair, but ... " He deliberated only for a moment. "He's not immune to his conscience either. When Blue Squadron was inbound to the facility on Eadu, I told him to call off the bombing because Alliance forces were still on that landing platform."

She blinked, brows furrowing. "But it was just me --"

"I know what I said. He knew who it was, too -- he wasn't going to consider Bodhi or Baze and Chirrut Alliance, and he knew Kay would have been on the ship. And he tried to call it off. Immediately, without hesitation. He would have compromised his objective and put his fighters at risk just to save one life. If Blue Squadron hadn't already engaged ... things would be different."

She was quiet. "I don't like that I can't properly hate him," she said finally, rolling her glass on its edge. "All I have to do is start thinking big picture, and -- and I understand. The worst part is, if I was in the same position I might have made the same call."

"We don't make them lightly," Cassian said, almost too quiet to be heard over the thudding music.

She stared at him for a long time, studying him -- searching for history between the spaces of his words, echoing in the silence. "Good. That's the crucial difference, isn't it? That it's for a good reason, and you would do anything else if you had the option." She chewed on her lip. "Did you tell him that you didn't ...?"

She didn't need to clarify. "No. I was planning on telling him tomorrow, at our sitrep. We have ... a lot of things to discuss."

"Like your assignment."

"Among other things."

"Like ...?"

He was an addict; he'd acquired a taste for the truth, more so for the way it made her eyes light up, each binding them ever closer. Now he was powerless before it. "Your assignment."

 


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> huge apologies for that unplanned hiatus, real life got a little too real for a while there. thank you so much to everyone who has read, bookmarked, kudo'd, and a special thanks to everyone who has left me such kind and thoughtful reviews. your support keeps me going!

Hours after the party ended, Bodhi found himself wandering the corridors of _Home I,_ his thoughts itching again _._ The main thoroughfare was sparsely populated, which suited Bodhi fine; only third-shift remained, patrolling and manning their stations with bleary eyes. But tonight, he thought they almost looked satisfied as they went about their business – their victory was only just now settling in, its implications, what it could mean for the Rebellion. Bodhi still couldn’t believe it, himself. The battle above Yavin IV shimmered in his memory like a mirage, a hallucination borne of desperate need.

He needed space after his conversation with Luke. Conversation was putting it mildly; talking to the younger pilot made Bodhi feel as if he were having a particularly spirited debate with a supernova. There was nothing you could do in the sight of such intensity but watch and listen, and try not to wear your awe on your face. Even the memory was enough to raise a chill on his arms. 

The cantina had been draped in heady darkness, and the sound clung to his skin like humid air, seeping into his lungs, until he could hear everything from within: thudding music, dozens of conversations, and a thrum beneath it all, almost inaudible. “I heard you,” Luke had said in a fervent hush, leaning over the table. “I _felt_ you. I know this is gonna sound crazy, but …”

Bodhi swallowed, jamming his hands under his thighs.

“How much do you know about the Jedi?”

_I am one with the Force and the Force is with me._

He didn’t know much about it. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to, either; the Jedi and the Sith and their endless wars had plunged the galaxy into darkness more times than anyone could remember. It was always some kind of ideological dispute, political maneuverings, betrayal; all of it was common enough. Not so common were the Jedi and Sith’s prodigious capacity for destruction, and seeming disregard for collateral damage. They were figments of fearful myth, a history better forgotten. Things were bad enough without invoking their ghosts.

But Luke didn’t see it that way. He spent hours enthusing over what he’d discovered in the last few days; that his father had been one, a peerless pilot and cunning warrior, a dashing hero who had been slain by Lord Vader in the final days of the Clone Wars. He even had his father’s lightsaber tucked inside his jacket pocket.

“I didn’t know my father either,” Bodhi said, for want of something to say. He had been a pilot too, a smuggler, and he died when Bodhi was just a few years old. Most likely, he’d been killed during a raid, or cracked off something smart to an official during inspection, or maybe he’d been carrying something too sensitive and the recipients decided to tie up that loose end after he’d made the drop. That was a common enough story, and there was no comfort in it: he confessed to Luke that sometimes when he was feeling sorry for himself, he’d daydream increasingly heroic ends for the father he never knew, unbelievable tales of bravery and sacrifice, anything to lessen the sting of his absence. He felt stupid even admitting it, but Luke beamed.

“I used to do that too,” he commiserated with an eager smile. “But smuggler, that’s pretty exciting. Slipping through enemy lines, bleeding them dry, sneaking supplies past blockades with Stormtroopers on your tail. It’s important, especially now.” 

“Hm.” Bodhi took a sip of his drink and lapsed into silence, the better to absorb Luke’s’ newest tirade (just how great Princess Leia and the smuggler Han Solo were, and how interesting, and how beautiful the princess was, and how Han had saved them both at the last minute, after he’d tried to escape ahead of the Imperials). He’d only known them for a few days, it sounded like, yet already spoke of them like they were his dearest friends. Bodhi found he could commiserate – he didn’t know that much about Jyn and Cassian yet, but he knew that he could trust them.

Bodhi had left only when the atmosphere became overwhelming; too many lights, too much sound, voices scraping against his nerves like fingernails over sheet metal. Luke bade him an earnest farewell before striding off in search of his new friends. It wasn’t the worst thing, to be almost instantly forgotten. This part of the ship was quieter, and he could hear himself think again.

Bodhi stumbled when his foot collided with something cavernously metal, nearly pitching him over; as he reeled back the astromech bleated at him before scooting down the sterile hallway. “Sorry,” Bodhi called after it, to which the droid let out another rude chorus of beeps. _It’s not because you’re a droid_ , Bodhi would have explained if he could. _I wouldn’t have even noticed the Emperor._

The collision had jolted his nerves. He was too jittery, and there was still too much to process all at once – deserting to Saw’s rebels, swept up by the Alliance, two massive battles within hours of each other. It was enough to frazzle even the most hardened soldier, let alone a jumpy cargo pilot from some Mid-Rim dump. But after a few more laps the tension between his shoulders slowly began to melt away, and he felt like he could finally breathe again. Something about Luke made the room feel airless – like he took up too much of it, but you couldn’t bring yourself to care about suffocating, not like you should have.

He hadn’t been wandering long when he found Jyn in a starboard observatory, huddled in front of the viewport and squinting into the pressing darkness, her knees hugged to her chest. She looked up when she heard Bodhi enter, nodding as he dropped down beside her and arranged himself as comfortably as he could on the cold duraplate floor.

“You’d think it’d be easier to sleep, now that everything’s calmed down a little,” she said, with a self-deprecating smile.

He shook his head. “You only feel like sleeping when there’s so much going on that you can’t.”

She looked out into the darkness again; a squad of X-Wings buzzed past the viewport, sublights winking in the darkness like fading stars, reflecting in her distant eyes. Her frown etched itself deeper, carving permanent lines by her mouth. “Do you ever think about regular people?”

“Are we not regular people?” he couldn’t stop himself from asking.

“I mean civilians. You know, with some nice trade, like a droidmaker, city planner, something easy. They know something is wrong with the galaxy, in a lot of places they live with the Empire breathing right down their necks, but they keep their eyes and ears closed and convince themselves that things aren’t so bad. Sometimes they just decide for themselves nothing is wrong, and resent anyone who would say that there was, because that means waking up. Having to look around and see how horrible everything really is.”

“You would want to be like that?”

“I don’t know,” Jyn said, picking at a hangnail. “They’re happier that way.  Don’t you think? It really seems like they are, because it’s such a simple position. Anyone crying out is an ungrateful agitator, the Empire’s just trying to preserve peace and order after the corruption of the previous government led to war after war, you have to get your hands a little dirty for the good of everyone – and it works. They make themselves believe it, and they’re happier. Don’t you think that’s a little unfair, that it’s so easy for them?”

“I used to be like that,” Bodhi said. “And it’s not easy at all.”

She went silent, watching him.

“Maybe not exactly like it,” he amended. “I wasn’t ever happy, and I never convinced myself things were okay. Just that they could be worse if I didn’t do my part, try to put some food on the table with wages from a respectable job, something that might give my family a little protection too.” He picked at a loose thread of his jumpsuit, pulling it taut before ripping it out. “To be honest, I don’t think anyone really convinces themselves. Not anymore, at least. Maybe when the Empire was still new.”

“Yeah.” She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “You’re probably right. I was just thinking about them today, because – well, they seem happy.”

 _And you’re not._ Bodhi took her hand and squeezed her fingers.

Her lip trembled. “They used to make Saw so mad. ‘Smilers’, he called them. He’d rant about how they’d be better off burying their heads ass up, so the Empire could fuck them one more time before they drowned in the sand.”

Bodhi shuddered. “How long did you say you lived with him?”

“I didn’t,” she said with a rueful smile. “Eight years.” She swiped at her eyes, sniffing angrily. “This is colossally stupid, isn’t it? This is what happens when you wait around without anything to do, you have too much time to think.”

He was well accustomed with the sensation, that buzzing under your scalp, a rising chorus rattling behind a poorly latched gate, but he got the feeling she had a lot more to outrun than he did.

She dropped her chin to her knees, speaking almost to herself. “He wanted to know what I’d do about the Empire. Like he had any right to ask me! And I said – it’s not a problem if you don’t look up. I knew it would upset him, and – and I wanted to hurt him. I wanted to see him flinch. He was talking to me like nothing had happened, like I was some long-lost pal come to visit and he hadn’t ditched me when it got inconvenient. It didn’t even occur to him that I’d be angry, it was just business. ‘People were getting suspicious’, give me a break. I was his best soldier at sixteen, I was fighting the Empire – of course I was, they took everything from me! And he was there and he taught me so much and then just –how could he have done that? I wanted to hurt him. I’m a Smiler now, what do you think of that, old man?” She shivered. “He didn’t even believe me.”

“I wouldn’t have either,” Bodhi said gently.

“Why not? I’m not a completely inept liar, you know.”

“Yeah, but he knew you well.” He wouldn’t defend Saw’s capacity for caring, not when the dark touch of Bol Gullet still lingered in his mind, a twisting, ragged shadow over his memories.

She seemed to realize this at the same time, for her gaze went hard, searing him. “I hate what he did to you, too. ‘Save the dream’, he said, as if the dream made it okay to torture someone who came to you in good faith, trying to help your cause.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

He shivered again, and immediately she threw an arm around his shoulder, pulling him close. “It wasn’t your fault,” he told her as she rubbed his shoulder, chafed some warmth back into him. “You’d have tried to stop it if you were there.”

“You bet I would have.”

“With your truncheons?”

“At the very least.”

He felt himself smile. That was true, and comforting to think about – that already he had a staunch ally in Jyn, and she had one in him.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I was just thinking about it because – this is so stupid. Cassian’s going to be talking to Draven about our assignments in a few hours, probably, and I’m just I’m waiting for it. The same thing that always happens.”

“What do you mean?”

She was quiet for a long time, scratching absently at her ankle until the skin was red and raw. “I don’t want to be split up,” she admitted when the silence grew unbearable. “Stupid, right? Every now and then, I have this out of body experience, looking down at what I’ve chosen – like an idiot! I don’t even know why I signed on sometimes, I think about Draven and kind of want to knock him out, but Cassian–“ She cut herself off, closed her eyes, before opening them with a resolute huff. “All of this doesn’t seem so impossible when you’re not alone, and I wouldn’t be even if we were separated but it’s – it’s not the same.”

“I think I know what you mean.”

She looked up at him, her eyes pleading, desperate to be understood.  

“When my class graduated from the Imperial Academy and got our new assignments, we were scattered all over the galaxy – the closest I was to anyone was a couple dozen systems, at the very least. They didn’t want us to know anyone, because they didn’t want anyone to be able to hide.”

Jyn cocked her head. “Hide?”

“Well, you know. When you go someplace new you’re more likely to stick to the people you know instead of learning the ropes, meeting your new coworkers, learning to rely on them. That’s more or less what we did this week, you know? Especially since they wanted to beat us up at first. If you have two graduates together they don’t have to try to integrate. And it’s harmless, mostly harmless. Who likes that new-kid feeling? Where you don’t know anything and anyone, you’re just wandering around waiting to step on someone’s feet. Except they don’t care about that, they don’t care about you forming new bonds and learning to trust your new comrades, they care about you fitting into their machine as efficiently as possible.  It’s so we’re isolated and unbalanced, so if they’re doing something wrong or bending the law we don’t have any support, we don’t have the people we trained with and trust, and Command can isolate you, beat you into shape, shut you up so –“

Jyn touched his arm.

“Sorry,” he whispered. “My nerves are shot.”

“Mine too,” she whispered back.

He chewed on his lip. “Anyway I don’t think they’re going to split us up,” Bodhi said. “The Alliance.”  

“Why not?”

“I don’t know, I just … I have a feeling.”

Jyn looked doubtful. “That’s not a lot to go on.”

Rather than get annoyed, he felt kind of tender toward her, protective, like he would for a little sister, though she was in many ways so old. “Maybe not, but … well there it is, anyway. I have a good feeling about it.

“Anyway, the Alliance isn’t like the Empire,” Bodhi said, on a rush of inspiration. He thought of Cassian, and the pilots he’d flown with, how quick they were to accept him. Maybe some of it was desperation, but in the same situation the Empire would not have done the same. “Galen talked about it in this strange code, because he was always being watched, he had to look like he was a good Imperial citizen. He’d make it sound like he was praising their efficiency but in that absent minded professor kind of way, like he was too isolated from what was going on in the galaxy to really understand the implications outside of his lab, so that if you really thought about it you’d see how bad it was–“

“Bodhi, “ she said, shivering. “I – I can’t right now. I can’t think about him. I know, I’m as bad as the Smilers, but … could you tell me about him later?”

Bodhi froze, shame congealing in his stomach. “Of course. W-whenever you want.”

“Thank you,” she said in a small voice.

Of course she wouldn’t; processing Saw was enough on its own. He took strange comfort in the fact that they shared this. “My – my point was just it’s not the same here. It’s not even the same as Saw’s. I don’t think so, anyway. So, I have a good feeling.”

He realized with a shock that he was unconsciously echoing Luke Skywalker and his words before the battle. But it felt right to say, so right that it didn’t matter whether he believed it or not. Doubt couldn’t defeat what was already true. This time he threw his arm around her shoulder and rubbed her back, folded a little warmth back into her, because that was what you did for your friends.

_~_

Cassian scrubbed at his raw eyes, blinking wearily down into the contents of his cup. It was caf in theory only; the reality was a gristly, bitter mess that made his teeth ache.  But it was better than nothing, and he was determined to carry on as usual. The usual business required a little fortification.

After another twelve straight hours in the bacta tank, he could move around a little easier, and in a fit of optimism (or obstinance) he left his cane behind, propped in a corner of his quarters and hidden by a few of his jackets. His progress through the curved hallways was slow, but steady; it might be a few more days before he was fit to fight, but he could at least oversee. And he would need to.

He nodded at a pair of passing ensigns, marshalling his thoughts. For today’s sitrep, he had an explanation and an appeal. He had meticulously rehearsed both while floating in the tank, establishing each point, compensating for every argument, pushing himself to anticipate the sterile, cutting mind of his handler and mentor. As impossible as the task might be.

Draven was waiting for him in his temporary office, a utilitarian box of a room with a low ceiling that gave Cassian the impression of being crushed, millimeter by millimeter, so slowly that you almost couldn’t notice. He scrolled through a datapad and sucked at his teeth – a bad sign. But he looked up when he heard the door hiss.

“Captain Andor,” said by way of greeting, setting the datapad aside.

Careful not to wince, Cassian lowered himself in the seat opposite Draven and nodded. “General.”

“I think we’ll skip the sitrep today. We have a lot to talk about. Unless, there’s anything more you want to tell me about Operation Fracture.”

 _He knows_ , Cassian thought, his stomach plummeting. Of course he knew. There was nothing left to do now but to confess.

“You ordered me to assassinate Galen Erso when the opportunity presented itself, and it had. But I didn’t take the shot.” Now it was real, and he couldn’t take it back. He almost admitted that he hadn’t been able to, that he had looked at Galen Erso through his scope and seen his daughter’s eyes, and he’d never hated himself more in that moment; his murders pressed on him, an uncountable weight, and he couldn’t add Jyn’s father to that number. When it came down to it, he couldn’t be the one to break her.  

The rationalizations came later: that he could have been used, that he could have led them to Imperial resources, that he could have provided them with an insider’s understanding of the technology he developed himself. But none of that had occurred to him in the moment.

“I know,” Draven said, and it was like he’d heard Cassian’s thoughts too. “Imperial shuttles are equipped with top of the line surveillance equipment. Can’t have their pilots stealing cargo or violating some asinine regulation or another.”

Jyn’s voice echoed in his thoughts: _It was Alliance bombs that killed him!_ “Of course,” he said. “Still, you should know from me.”

“I appreciate your candor.” Draven’s expression almost softened. “Everyone hesitates at least once. Even the best.”  

“It – it wasn’t hesitation. I decided I wasn’t going to do it.” His palms had begun to sweat, and he steeled himself. “And that’s part of what I wanted to talk to you about, sir. I need the freedom to approach an objective as I see fit. And I need to be able to reassess such an objective based on new information, information that I might not be able to communicate to you efficiently.” His voice dropped. “We’re not remorseless killers, we’re not the Empire. We shouldn’t operate like them.”

“The fact that you feel remorse is what makes you effective, Captain. And it’s what separates us from the Empire.”

“I think we need to be better than that. Remorse is fine, but it’s not unique to us, and it’s no comfort to anyone who died because we took the cold route. We could have used Galen. Assassination made sense when we thought he was a willing lackey, but watching him interact with the Imperials you could see that he wasn’t. And it mattered that he wasn’t! It should matter. He was a prisoner, and I might have killed him because it was efficient, had I not stopped to think about it. We can’t be like this. We have to be better than this, sir.”

Draven said nothing, only watched Cassian with inscrutable eyes.

“It’s not just idealism, either,” Cassian said, regrouping. “We’ve been throwing out a lot we can use.”

“But that’s not your primary concern.”

Draven knew him too well, was too good as his job. “All of it is my concern.”

“I don’t like this,” Draven said, masking his exhaustion and anxiety with a stern façade, but Cassian saw it in the tightness of his mouth, the crease between his brows.  “I’m inclined to say no. If anyone else asked me this, I would have upfront. I might have even demoted them. But … I’m not in a position to disagree with you. You made a good call, no matter your reasons. And … well, to be honest with you, you’ve earned my trust in your judgment.”

“Sir?”

“Don’t sound so surprised.” That was the only praise or explanation Cassian was likely to get, so he let the matter drop, though his thoughts reeled – he’d now had three conversations with his implacable superior who suddenly didn’t seem so implacable.

 _You did almost die,_ the voice reminded him. _Maybe he’s glad you didn’t_. He dismissed the thought as sentiment, and inaccurate at that.

Draven forged ahead, tapping the edge of the datapad against his desk. “I’ve been thinking about your assignment, Captain Andor. How is your leg?”

“It’s nearly finished healing. I can barely feel it anymore.”

“Mm.” He didn’t believe him, and Cassian hadn’t expected him to. The concern jarred him, regardless. “I’m glad to hear it. I have something somewhat … unorthodox I need you to do, Captain.”

He had to spit it out before he lost the chance. He knew it was a risk to pursue this. It was a betrayal of his principles and the people he fought for. They deserved everything he had to give, and he would give anything for peace. Jyn had reorganized his priorities without even knowing about it, and he shouldn’t risk that on an assignment. But the little voice persisted: _have you been compromised?_

“Sir, I request that Bodhi Rook and Jyn Erso be transferred to my command for this assignment.”

He almost thought amusement glinted in the older man’s eyes. “You don’t even know what it is yet.”

“I’m confident they’d be an asset regardless of the assignment.”  

“I agree,” Draven said simply.

Cassian froze; for a moment, the constant reel of speculation and analysis in his mind shuddered to a stop. He’d counted on every contingency except for complete acceptance. “You what?”

“I agree. Of course, I agree. It’s the best way to handle this situation,” Draven said, steepling his fingers. “I’ve been thinking about it since Scarif. You’re all too valuable to shelve for good, but it’s a risk assigning you separately; if you’re discovered you could bring undue attention to the campaign and its operatives, and that’s two more major losses than we can afford. Three more, speaking frankly. But we can both minimize the total risk and utilize your skills by sending you on special operations together.” He almost smiled. “Not to mention, you’ve proven yourselves resourceful and efficient as a team. Erso is a skilled slicer and forger, and Rook is an effective pilot and comms tech. We would be fools not to take advantage of this.”

“Of course,” Cassian said. Draven’s amenable reaction calmed the tangle of apprehension in his gut; it must not be a stupid plan if it had occurred to his superior separately.

“We might even be able to train Erso in the art of subtlety.”

“She did evade the Empire for years, sir. I think that requires at least a little subtlety.”

Draven’s expression went smooth, glacial. “Indeed.”

 _Shit_. He’d said too much.

But Draven let it pass without further comment. “I admit was surprised when she signed on. She didn’t strike me as the forgiving type.”

“I don’t think it’s about that. It’s her fight too,” Cassian said, moved to her defense. “It has been for a long time.”

“You can’t blame me for being skeptical, Andor.”

No, of course not. Skepticism was the bedrock of their business, one of their most effective tools. “You said you have something unorthodox for us, sir?” And they had only been an official team for a few minutes, but already it felt right to say. He hadn’t known that it would.

“Right,” said Draven, and the old mad gleam in his eyes resurfaced, pleasure at a plan well-conceived. “Here’s what you’re going to do.”

~

Jyn watched a group of pilots jog toward their idling ships and hardened her heart. She and Bodhi had staked out the observatory by the hangar bay, the better to watch the comings and goings; fighters, freights, a battered little cargo ship that had to be at least fifty years old, covered in one hundred years of grime. Only Command chambers would have been more informative.

And she needed information. She had to brace herself for the inevitable separation, closer with every passing moment. Anticipating this, she stuck to Bodhi like a burr embedded in his jacket, though she suspected he didn’t mind; the pair of them traversed _Home I’s_ endless hallways hardly a handspan apart, hesitant to part for even a moment. She could leave and then come back and find he’d been summoned, and that was the last she’d ever see of him.

It was for this reason she couldn’t see Cassian at all. Anything more would make leaving worse than it had to be.

So she sat with Bodhi and watched the ships and counted down the minutes to the end, building a wall around her heart. This was why you kept to yourself, she chastised. Endings were inevitable, and goodbyes were impossible to bear.

“Why hasn’t anyone called us yet?” Bodhi fretted, jiggling his leg. “It’s been a few days just waiting around. Do you think they forgot about us?”

“Impossible,” Jyn said at once. “Not after Scarif.”

“Yeah,” Bodhi said, dejected. He probably hoped that they had been.

She turned back to the viewport and watched the ships, chewing on a hangnail. It was a bad sign that they hadn’t been marshalled into some earnestly-named company by now, given a uniform and kit and packed away on some shuttle to the front. The longer they waited for summons, the worse the knot in her stomach grew, until she couldn’t even swallow without nearly choking on her gag reflex. Maybe they’d be court-marshalled for disobedience. Maybe Cassian would be imprisoned for his insubordination, maybe even executed for taking the Alliance’s best operatives on some unsanctioned mission that got most of them killed. Or for disobeying his orders.

With a little breath, she rejected this speculation; for all their faults, the Rebel Alliance wasn’t the Empire. Besides, they’d have been punished by now if it was going to happen, instead of being given free conduct to wander around while they waited for orders. She bolstered herself with this logic, and forced herself to forget her attachment entirely. He was nothing. She barely knew him. _Welcome home_ was a heat of the moment declaration, or a tease; they were about to undertake a suicide mission, after all.   _Why can’t you forget about that stupid comment, anyway? He probably has._ The Kyber seemed to throb atop her heart, warming bare skin.

“Look, second patrol’s about to start,” Bodhi said, peering down at the hangar. She didn’t know how he could tell – they all looked about the same to her, and neither of them had a chrono. He sounded almost wistful, but a little sick too, and she understood. “Huh … it’s nearly doubled.”

This failed to register on any meaningful level. “Do you want to get something to eat?” she asked, mostly for his benefit. Her own stomach felt like a sack of eels.

He shook his head. “People stare more in the cafeteria.”

Jyn grimaced; it was better than suspicion, and much better than getting punched in the face, but still there was something grating about the attention. She didn’t know how to accept their thanks gracefully, in no small part because it felt misapplied, and reminded her of things she’d rather deal with later. Much later. 

Her unease deepened into foreboding. The hangar had been a mistake; now she’d have to watch him leave, watch the lie play out in real time.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said, standing so fast that her head spun.

She thought about it later; how strange it had been that Cassian chose that moment to materialize – the exact moment she couldn’t bear it anymore. She saw him moving through the crowd, a duffel hitched over his shoulder, and her heart sank. Here it was; the inevitable. Even bracing herself for it, she wasn’t prepared for how badly it hurt.

Cassian met her gaze, and she froze – every cell, even her heartbeat; yet instead of offering a perfunctory wave goodbye, he broke away from the crowd and strode purposefully toward them, struggling to smooth the limp out of his gait. She saw the effort manifest in the tightness of his jaw, a muscle there flickering desperately, and felt a surge of irritation at him, mingled with unwelcome tenderness. That idiot was pushing himself too hard. “Good, you’re both here,” he said when he reached them, a little winded. “I don’t have to track you down.”

“Of course,” she heard herself retort, as if from across a great distance. “Anything to make your life easier.”

But, impossibly, he smiled, and it knocked the breath out of her, like he’d sunk a fist in her stomach. He only had to look at her and it felt physical; a smile was nearly an invasion. “We’re shipping out ASAP,” he said around that stupid smile, damn him. “Grab your gear and meet me back here in an hour.”

The dreaded  _we_ – but this time it was exactly what she wanted to hear, so naturally it made her suspicious. “What do you mean,  _we_?”

“Shipping out?” Bodhi echoed.

She thought the horrible, wonderful smile would split his face in half. “As of an hour ago, you’re part of my crew. Technically, Jyn, you’re an operative, and Bodhi is my copilot. I’d congratulate you with a nice meal or something, but we don’t have a lot of time to spare.”

Her incredulity was nearly physical, and with it came the bone-deep fear that any moment now this would be taken away; that’d he laugh at her hope, though she’d guarded it carefully. Bodhi spoke for her: “What the – what are you talking about?” 

“I’ll explain more en route. We really do have to go now, though.”

They stared at Cassian, processing his nearly uncharacteristic eagerness, reconciling it to the hardened operative she’d met a few weeks ago. This was exactly what she wanted, the opposite of what she feared, and she couldn’t trust it – the inevitable was coming, not even the most earnest intentions could defeat it. She knew that, she knew it, it was essential that she never forget, yet all it took was an eager smile to cut through days of fortification, and years of scar tissue. “I don’t have any gear,” she said finally.

“Me either,” said Bodhi.

“Right.” Cassian rubbed the back of his neck; his smile became a little sheepish, and far more charming than it had any right to be. “We’ll get you some. We have to resupply anyway. Come on.”

As he turned to leave, Bodhi beamed at her, giving her shoulder a little nudge. “What did I say, huh? I told you.”

“Yeah,” she echoed, dazed. Maybe she should put a little more stock in Bodhi’s feelings, as wild and impossible as they seemed to her.

They set out with no further discussion. The bustle of the hangar bay hardly touched her; she moved through a diffuse cloud of heat and sound, studying the angle of Cassian’s neck, the tilt of his head, the smile she suspected was still there. Wishing so badly she could see what he was thinking, and know for sure what it meant.

Hope burgeoned in her, despite herself, despite everything. He'd welcomed her home, and she hadn't known what he meant at first, hadn't wanted to know -- hadn't given herself a chance to really think about it, in case it wasn't true. But she felt it, now. This stupid ship with the inappropriate name; this was no home. Home was limping onto a crappy, grime-encrusted freighter, hitching a battered duffel up his shoulder.


End file.
